Old Clip of Cake Laced With Pills Revived With a False Communal Narrative

We could trace the video back to 2019 when it was shared with a different claim. The product is not sold in India.

The video shows a Turkish product, which is not sold in India.

(Photo: Twitter/Altered by The Quint)

A clip showing a pair of hands open and tear apart packaged cake to find two round, white pills in them is being widely shared across social media platforms.

Sharing the clip, users claimed that it showed a product made by Muslims, who are selling it to Hindu children with pills that sterilise them, in order to control the country's Hindu population so that they can take over the nation.

However, the claim is false. The video, which shows a confectionery called Luppo Coconut Cream cake, is a product of Turkish company Solen, which is not sold in Asia, as per the company's product catalogue.

The video has been shared since 2019 and went viral across continents with the claim that the pills could cause paralysis in children. Turkish fact-checking website Teyit had debunked the claim in 2019 after accessing laboratory results of the product's manufacturing process.

CLAIM

The claim accompanying the video is originally written in Hindi, and roughly translates to – "Sterilising pills added by Muslims, to products consumed by children to render boys and girls sterile, in order to control Hindu population so they can capture the country."

An archived version of this tweet can be accessed here.

(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)

More claims across social media can be seen here, here, and here.

The Quint received queries for the video's verification on its WhatsApp tipline as well.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

In the video, the product's packaging reads "Luppo Coconut Cream". Looking up the name, we were led to Turkish company Solen's Asia-centric website, which manufactures the Luppo line of products along with many other consumables.

As per Solen Asia's products page for Luppo, the company does not sell the product seen in the video in Asia.

The company only sells two products under its 'Luppo' brand.

(Source: Solen Asia/Screenshot)

In the video, one can also see a bag labelled 'Aspilic' underneath the glass surface. We looked up this world and found that it was a Turkish company that sells frozen packaged meat and does not operate in India. These two indicators helped us confirm that the video is not from India.

The logo on the bag and the website match.

(Source: Twitter/Astavuc/Altered by The Quint)

Using InVID, we divided the video into keyframes and ran a reverse image search on some of them. The results led us to a video uploaded to YouTube in 2019, establishing that the clip is old.

Other results showed that the video had previously been shared across the globe and claimed that it had "paralysis pills" and had been debunked by multiple fact-checkers.

Teyit, a Turkish fact-checking website, had contacted Solen Chocolate in 2019. The company shared laboratory reports with Teyit – both internal and independent ones – which showed that the manufacturing process for the product had passed the audit.

The report also said that the product was exported from Turkey and hence was rechecked at any point of entry to another country.

Additionally, Teyit elaborated on the ingredients used in the product and Solen's automated manufacturing process, with an official noting that if pills were added to the product at the manufacturing level "it must melt or deform during the baking process," concluding that the pills could have been added after the product was made and packaged.

The article also noted how one could see deformations on the top layer of the product, which were the spots where the person finds the pills, suggesting that they were inserted into the product.

There are small indentations at the spots where the person finds pills.

(Source: Twitter/Altered by The Quint)

Clearly, a 2019 video of a person removing pills from a packaged Turkish food product that is not sold in India was shared, claiming falsely that people from the Muslim community added "sterilising pills" to their products for kids, in order to keep a check on the country's Hindu population.

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