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Is there a Robot bodyguard in Bahrain?

TDT | Manama

News sometimes is like wildfire, barely controllable and producing undesirable results. It might even burn for months, despite enormous efforts to put it out. Social media have many such fires, kept on burning by gullible minds for years without even bothering to do a fact-check! One such widely shared false-fire on twitter happens to have Bahrain tagged to it.

A video claims that a Bahraini royal arrived in Dubai with his robot bodyguard! What more needed for netizens to go berserk. And they went out with an arsenal of guns firing in excitement at all possible directions. It hasn’t stopped yet! Twitter user @RoshanCricket in a post along with the video wrote, A Bahraini royal “arrives in Dubai with his robot bodyguard fitted 360 with cameras and inbuilt pistols.

Technology moving very fast than ever in history. Now politicians might order this too.” In a jiffy, the video garnered some 3.6 million views, 17.6k retweets and 22.8k likes. There is also a deluge of comments and replies to his post. Several jaws, as expected, are down on the floor, while certain others also attempted to get the facts right.

“Such an easily verifiable bit of misinformation should be grounds for bluecheck removal,” wrote @visakanv in his reply to @RoshanCricket. Another user @jaykelly83 pointed out that it isn’t a Bahrain royal “and that ‘robot’ has an Emirati flag on its arm.” A user from Bahrain @KhalidKooheji, also replying to @RoshanCricket, confirms the tweet as “total nonsense”.

“I’m from Bahrain and I can confirm that this tweet is total nonsense.” He confirms seeing not any royal in the video while pointing out that “the robot has an Emirati flag on.” But the video continued to be shared online with its caption getting fatter and fatter with imaginations raging like a wildfire. According to another user, @gaiaonline420, “that is not a robot, it does not have pistols, and this video is a year and a half old.” So, what is this video, which has garnered over 3.6 million views?