Several images of Nobel laureate and renowned economist Amartya Sen went viral on the internet with a claim that he passed away at the age of 89.
Who all shared the claim?: Media organisations such as Times of India, Zee News, First Post, Business Today, and Deccan Chronicle shared the news.
Online news portal Free Press Journal, Moneycontrol and The Siasat Daily, too, shared the claim.
Most of these organisations reported the death of Sen on the basis of a tweet shared from an X (formerly Twitter) account in the name of Nobel prize winner 'Claudia Goldin'.
(Swipe right to view all claims.)
An archive of the report can be found here.
(Source: Times of India/Screenshot)
What is the truth?: Sen's daughter and actor Nandana Sen posted a clarification on her official X account stating that the news about her father's death is "fake".
Moreover, the account running in the name of 'Claudia Goldin' is a hoax account created by Italian “journalist“ Tommasso Debenedetti.
How did we find out?:
The account that first posted about Sen's death had earlier posted about the Nobel prize win while making a typo.
The post read, “Very hapoy to announce that I won the Nobel Prize in Economics for 2023. Thanks!!! (sic)”
While going through the comments, we found people mentioning that Goldin’s original account was called @PikaGoldin, which has been active since 2013 and links back to her Harvard profile.
The other account, on the other hand, was created in May 2023.
We checked the X account that shared the news and found a subsequent post that said that "this account is hoax created by Italian journalist Tommaso Debenedetti. (sic)"
For the unversed, the said journalist is a serial fake news peddler who creates imposter accounts of famous people or organisations and then posts the news about a person's death.
In the past, Debenedetti has posted posts about the death of Kazuo Ishiguro, the pope, and Fidel Castro.
In a report published in 2012, The Guardian called Debenedetti "one of the world's most creative and successful fake tweeters."
The Washington Post, too, published a report in 2017 on how people and news organisations picked up hoaxes shared by Debenedetti as real.
Sen's daughter clarifies: Actor Nandana Sen shared a post on her official X account mentioning that her father is "totally fine." She said that both of them spent a week together with family in Cambridge.
Conclusion: It is clear that the news about Amartya Sen's death is fake and is based on a hoax post shared by a serial fake news peddler.
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