A post went viral on social media amid local elections in Nepal with a Hashtag #BBC_Nepali claiming it as the internal vote survey of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Nepali service. According to it, the communist party of Nepal Unified Marxist-Leninist (UML) is leading in the elections, Nepal Congress party is on second number and the Unified Communist party of Nepal- Maoist (UCPN-M) is on third.

When data was retrieved, the post had 1K likes, 172 comments with 86 shares. The post was widely shared on twitter too.

Debunked Source

https://twitter.com/Bhisma5_Pitamah/status/1524637827580919808

https://twitter.com/Birendr04844453/status/1524544425480892416

https://twitter.com/Anzel_Nisha/status/1524640360693075968

https://twitter.com/tnpoudelymailc2/status/1524401461018636291

https://twitter.com/shining_prince1/status/1524419201674641408

https://www.facebook.com/omprakash.paudel.581/posts/544409750541716

https://www.facebook.com/arjun.neupane.773/posts/5685755221453997

https://www.facebook.com/bishnu.adhikari.5201/posts/4649330801839651

Fact Check

In order to investigate the claim, we checked for BBC News Nepal official handles on social media found that BBC has denied the claim of carrying out such a survey in Nepal.

Moreover, we checked for official results of Nepal Local Election and found that Nepal Congress won the most electoral seats while Unified Marxist-Leninist (UML) was second and the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) was ranked third.

Source

ffhttps://www.facebook.com/BBCnewsNepali/posts/5014719445250155

ffhttps://twitter.com/bbcnepali/status/1524631818573656065

ffhttps://election.ekantipur.com/?lng=eng

Rating

Misinformation/Hoax

Conclusion

Our research confirmed that the viral post was a rumor in order to show Unified Marxist-Leninist (UML) as winning party to mislead the public and to create pressure on other parties and their supporters.

ABCDE Framework-Based Analysis

Actor	Independent social media accounts are involved in spreading misinformation on social media.
Behavior	A survey result is posted on social media, claiming it to be an internal survey conducted by BBC Nepal, to mislead the public.
Content	Social Media posts.
Degree	The content is being spread to mislead people regarding election results. No synthetic means are used to make the content viral. Since the survey was wrongly associated with BBC Nepal, people believed it to be authentic and shared it widely across social media platforms.
Effect	The shared video is being circulated to mislead the audience and portray that the Unified Marxist-Leninist (UML) is winning with majority. Disinformation and elections have a deep-rooted relationship, misinformation is spread before, after and on election day to spread chaos and uncertainty among people.