How Maulana Atif Qadri's fake fatwa tweet against Priya Prakash Varrier got social media buzzing

The internet is a great place to be on. It makes you laugh, it makes you cry and it turns a small town girl into a star overnight – the recent example being Malayalam actress Priya Prakash Varrier. The 18-year-old has been making headlines for her wink in a song that went viral, from her debut movie Oru Adaar Love's teaser. And has even attracted a controversy thanks to a complaint filed by a resident of Hyderabad.

Set aside from these, Priya was the butt of several memes. But a joke by a parody account went way too far that it got covered by several media houses as a real news. A fake statement by Maulana Atif Qadri, the vice-president of the West Bengal Minority United Council, made rounds claiming that a fatwa has been issued against the internet sensation for hurting religious sentiments.

A fake statement reads, "After the viral video of Priya Prakash Varrier, whenever we or our fellow Muslim Brothers closed our eyes to offer Namaz, instead of Allah, her face would appear, which is hurting our sentiments, hence we issued a fatwa against her."

The fake statement was issued by a parody account called Times How. The satire account's profile picture has a close similarity to the logo of Times Now which caused a chaos online.

A popular Hindi news channel also hosted a debate based on the tweet, however, the anchor later apologized for the confusion caused.

The news channel was not the only one to be fooled. Several senior media personalities, internet stars, and online users fell prey to the fake tweet and reacted to the false statement. Later, many apologized for it.

Oh internet, what a weird, weird world you are!