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Indian Air Force Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman’s return to India was marked by relief and celebration. However, soon after he came back to India on Friday, 1 March, a string of similar-looking tweets flooded the micro-blogging site, highlighting once again how viral content on social media, is often just... viral content.
The fact that the caption was copied without putting much though to it can be best comprehended in a particular tweet posted by a handle @iamkesarchauhan, who ended up saying that his ‘brother’ gave birth to a boy.
The ‘baby boy tweets’ can be traced back to one Anuj Ojha, who uses the Twitter handle @ajjuishere.
On 2 March, a day after the tweets went viral, Anuj called out the trend, terming the act of those involved ‘shameless’.
Even as many of the ‘Twitter babies’ were copy-paste jobs, there have been genuine instances too, of parents naming their newborn Abhinandan.
The Quint could contact at least two such families. Janesh Bhutani, who stays in Alwar in Rajasthan said that the family unanimously decided to name his grandson, born on 1 March evening, Abhinandan. Mukesh Meena of Nihalpura in Dausa in the same state, echoed a similar story behind naming his son after the Wing Commander.
Both Bhutani and Meena, however, confirmed that the pictures of the babies going viral on social media are not of their family’s newest member.
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