#FactCheck- Viral Kapil Mishra Video on 50% Attendance Not Recent
Executive Summary
A video of Delhi government cabinet minister Kapil Mishra is being shared on social media. In the clip, he can be heard saying that from the next day, only 50 percent attendance will be allowed in offices, while the remaining 50 percent employees will work from home. He also states that all institutions must comply with this. Users are sharing the video as a recent development. However, a study by the CyberPeace found the viral claim to be misleading. Our research revealed that the video is not recent but dates back to December 2025.
Claim:
An Instagram user shared the viral video on March 24, 2026. The link to the post is given below.
Fact Check:
To verify the claim, we conducted a keyword search on Google. During this process, we found a report published on December 17, 2025, on NDTV Hindi. According to the report, the Delhi government had made 50 percent work-from-home mandatory in government offices due to severe air pollution. Additional restrictions were also imposed under GRAP Stage IV.
Further, we found the original video on the official social media handle of BJP Delhi. In this video, Kapil Mishra can be heard stating that 50 percent work-from-home has been made mandatory in all government and private offices in Delhi, while health and other essential services have been exempted from this arrangement.
Conclusion:
Our research found that the viral video is not recent. It is from December 2025 and is being shared with a misleading claim.
Related Blogs
Executive Summary
A video is being widely shared on social media linking it to a Muharram procession in India. The video shows a person engulfed in flames, with users claiming that an individual was deliberately set on fire during a Muharram procession in India. Several social media users are circulating the clip with communal claims. CyberPeace Research Wing research found that the viral claim is misleading. The video does not show any incident of a person being deliberately burned during a Muharram procession. In reality, it is from Deoria, Uttar Pradesh, where a performer sustained burn injuries while performing stunts during a Muharram procession.
Claim:
On X (formerly Twitter), a user posted the viral video on 3 June 2026, claiming: “Not Bangladesh, this is India where a person is being burned alive during a Muharram procession.” The post link, archive link, and screenshots are provided below. https://x.com/singh_kikki/status/2070753631167541586 , https://archive.ph/vP3bZ
Fact Check:
For verification, we extracted multiple keyframes from the video and conducted a reverse image search using Google Lens. During the search, we found the same video published on the Public app on 27 June 2026. According to the report, the incident took place on Malviya Road in Deoria city, Uttar Pradesh, during a Muharram procession, where a member of the 5-Star Club akhara, Saddam (24), a resident of Bans Deoria, suffered burn injuries while performing stunts involving fire. The report further stated that members of the akhara immediately rescued him and arranged first aid. Police confirmed that his condition is stable and that the incident was accidental. No other untoward incident was reported, and all Muharram processions were conducted peacefully. A statement by Circle Officer (City), Sanjay Kumar Reddy, was also included in the report. https://public.app/video/sp_zh7dywam0a2pb
In our subsequent research, we found a report published on Dainik Bhaskar's website with the same claim. A link and screenshot of the post are provided below. https://www.bhaskar.com/amp/local/uttar-pradesh/deoria/news/deoria-youth-burns-muharram-procession-stunt-138296624.html
Finally, we also found an official post from the Deoria Police X handle confirming the incident. The police stated that a performer from the 5-Star Club akhara was injured while performing stunts on Malviya Road and was immediately given first aid. His condition is stable, and no other incident occurred. https://x.com/DeoriaPolice/status/2070521290864377982
Conclusion:
The research clearly found that the viral video does not show a person being deliberately burned during a Muharram procession. The footage is from Deoria, Uttar Pradesh, where a performer was accidentally injured during a fire stunt.
Executive Summary
A video circulating on social media shows Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and Gorakhpur MP Ravi Kishan walking with a group of people. Users are claiming that the two leaders were participating in a protest against the University Grants Commission (UGC). Research by CyberPeace has found the viral claim to be misleading. Our research revealed that the video is from September 2025 and is being shared out of context with recent events. The video was recorded when Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath undertook a foot march in Gorakhpur on a Monday. Ravi Kishan, MP from Gorakhpur, was also present. During the march, the Chief Minister visited local markets, malls, and shops, interacting with traders and gathering information on the implementation of GST rate cuts.
Claim Details:
On Instagram, a user shared the viral video on 27 January 2026. The video shows the Chief Minister and the MP walking with a group of people. The text “UGC protest” appears on the video, suggesting that it is connected to a protest against the University Grants Commission.
Fact Check:
To verify the claim, we searched Google using relevant keywords, but found no credible media reports confirming it.Next, we extracted key frames from the video and searched them using Google Lens. The video was traced to NBT Uttar Pradesh’s X (formerly Twitter) account, posted on 22 September 2025.
According to NBT Uttar Pradesh, CM Yogi Adityanath undertook a foot march in Gorakhpur, visiting malls and shops to interact with traders and check the implementation of GST rate cuts.
Conclusion:
The viral video is not related to any recent UGC guidelines. It dates back to September 2025, showing CM Yogi Adityanath and MP Ravi Kishan on a foot march in Gorakhpur, interacting with traders about GST rate cuts.The claim that the video depicts a protest against the University Grants Commission is therefore false and misleading.
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Think about the difference between a video game and gambling the way most people were taught to understand it. A video game is something you play, maybe you spend money on it upfront, maybe you buy an expansion pack, but what you get in return is fixed and known. Gambling is different: you put money in, and what comes back is uncertain, decided by chance, with real financial stakes attached to the outcome. For decades, that distinction was reasonably clear. It no longer is.
Across a growing number of mobile games and gaming platforms, the two have started to blend into each other. Games increasingly include features where a player pays real money for a randomised reward, a mechanic structurally identical to a slot machine or a scratch card, just wrapped in animation, sound effects, and gaming language that makes it feel like part of the game rather than a bet. Because this trend targets an audience that skews young, and because it deliberately makes gambling like behaviour feel like ordinary play, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime recently flagged it as a serious and growing concern. Understanding exactly what is happening, and why it matters, starts with their warning.
What UNODC is actually warning about
The claim traces back to UNODC's July 2026 report, An Interconnected Criminal Ecosystem: Transnational Organised Crime Threat Assessment for Southeast Asia 2026. Delphine Schantz, UNODC's regional representative for South-East Asia and the Pacific, put the core problem plainly: the line between online gaming and online gambling is becoming increasingly blurred, and platforms have converged through design features that deliberately exploit that ambiguity. Online gaming, by definition, never required money changing hands. What the report documents is a shift where mobile accessibility, deliberately addictive design, and the introduction of real monetary stakes are pulling younger users into something that looks and feels like gaming but functions, mechanically, like gambling.
The report's most striking finding is not really about the games themselves. It is about what happens after. UNODC found that illegal online gambling platforms operating across the region do not simply extract money from young users; they generate a secondary population of indebted, criminally exposed young people who become vulnerable to recruitment into broader criminal networks, including debt collection operations, money mule schemes, and the scam compounds the report documents elsewhere. In other words, the gambling loss is often only the first harm. The debt it creates becomes the entry point into something considerably worse.
The mechanics of the convergence
This is not a vague, impressionistic claim. Academic researchers have spent close to a decade documenting the specific design features responsible for blurring gaming and gambling, and loot boxes sit at the centre of that research. A loot box is a purchasable in game item containing randomised rewards, structurally similar to a scratch card or a slot pull, wrapped in gaming aesthetics, animated reveal sequences, anticipation building sound design, that make the underlying mechanic easy to overlook. Researchers writing in Nature Human Behaviour as early as 2018 argued loot boxes are psychologically akin to gambling, and subsequent studies have consistently found meaningful associations between loot box engagement and problem gambling severity in young people. One widely cited cross sectional study estimated that between 16 and 21 percent of surveyed young people had engaged in gambling like video game practices at least once in the preceding year, and found that people who engaged in one such practice were highly likely to engage in several more, suggesting these mechanics function less as isolated features and more as an interconnected ecosystem designed to normalise wagering behaviour early.
What makes this genuinely difficult to regulate is precisely the ambiguity Schantz pointed to. A loot box does not always pay out in real currency; often the reward is a cosmetic item, a weapon skin, or in game currency that can then be resold or traded on secondary markets, creating real monetary value once removed from the platform that generated it. That one extra step, converting a virtual reward into tradeable value outside the game itself, has repeatedly let gambling like mechanics avoid classification under gambling law, even as researchers increasingly argue the psychological experience for the user is functionally identical. Regulators in several countries, including the UK, South Korea, and parts of Europe, have wrestled with exactly this classification problem for years, generally landing on disclosure requirements, probability labelling, and age restrictions rather than outright bans, an approach critics argue leaves the core mechanic intact while addressing only its edges.
The mobile phone has made all of this considerably harder to contain. Where gambling once required a physical location, an ID check, or at minimum a desktop browser, mobile gaming apps put the same monetised, chance based mechanics directly into a pocket, often accessible without any meaningful age verification beyond a self reported birth date a user can simply falsify. UNODC's own framing of "mobile access" as a driving factor is not incidental; it is arguably the single structural change that turned what was once a manageable regulatory grey zone into a rapidly scaling public health concern.
Why age matters so much here
Financial literacy research is fairly consistent on this point: the capacity to reason clearly about risk, probability, and long term financial consequence continues developing well into a person's twenties. Marketing a mechanic engineered around variable reward schedules, the same principle behind slot machine design, to an audience whose risk judgment is still forming is not an accident of overlapping demographics. It is, as UNODC's own language suggests, closer to a deliberate exploitation of that gap.
Where India fits into this picture
India has arguably moved further and faster on this exact concern than most jurisdictions. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025, alongside its accompanying 2026 Rules that came into force on 1 May 2026, drew a hard statutory line most countries have avoided: real money online games, including fantasy sports, rummy, poker, and online casino style platforms, are now categorically prohibited in India, not merely regulated. A newly created central regulator, the Online Gaming Authority of India, oversees a separate, permitted category for e-sports and social games, requiring registration, age gating, and grievance redressal mechanisms, while offshore and unregistered real money platforms are now explicitly illegal to operate or use, backed by bank freeze powers and potential prosecution of platform directors.
The government's own stated rationale mirrors UNODC's warning almost exactly. Lawmakers cited addiction and social harm linked to real money games, reports that Indian users lose close to 20,000 crore rupees annually on these platforms, concerns about money laundering and potential terror financing routed through gaming networks, and specifically flagged the vulnerability of teenagers increasingly drawn into fantasy leagues and online poker as a driving justification. India's approach, an outright prohibition on monetary stakes rather than a licensed regulatory model similar to the UK's Gambling Commission or Malta's Gaming Authority, is distinctive by global standards, and reflects a judgement that the gaming gambling boundary has already become too difficult to police through disclosure and age verification alone.
The larger question this leaves open
Whether prohibition succeeds where lighter touch regulation elsewhere has struggled remains genuinely unresolved, and enforcement against offshore platforms determined to evade an Indian ban is likely to be an ongoing challenge rather than a solved problem. What UNODC's warning underscores, and what India's own legislative response implicitly concedes, is that voluntary industry self regulation was never going to be sufficient on its own. Platforms have commercial incentive to keep the gaming gambling boundary blurry, not to clarify it, because that ambiguity is precisely what lets monetised, addictive design features reach audiences who would otherwise be walled off from gambling entirely. Closing that gap convincingly will likely require the kind of cross sector coordination, spanning gaming regulators, financial authorities, and platform accountability, that UNODC's own statement called for, rather than any single fix applied in isolation.
References
- UNODC, "An Interconnected Criminal Ecosystem: Transnational Organised Crime Threat Assessment for Southeast Asia 2026," July 2026.
- The Hawk, "UNODC warns young gamers lured into online gambling." https://www.thehawk.in/news/india/unodc-warns-young-gamers-lured-into-online-gambling
- IAG, "UNODC report says Southeast Asian illegal online gambling creating cycle of crime that targets youth." https://asgam.com/2026/07/22/unodc-report-says-southeast-asian-illegal-online-gambling-creating-cycle-of-crime-that-targets-the-youth/
- GambleAware, "Lifting the Lid on Loot Boxes: Chance-based purchases in videogames and the convergence of gaming and gambling." https://www.gambleaware.org/media/aswow4lr/gaming_and_gambling_report_final_0.pdf Drummond
- A, Sauer JD, "Video game loot boxes are psychologically akin to gambling," Nature Human Behaviour, 2018. PubMed, "Loot Boxes, Gambling, and Problem Gambling Among Young People: Results from a Cross-Sectional Online Survey." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33103911/
- Mondaq, "Play By The New Rules: India's 2026 Online Gaming Law Decoded." https://www.mondaq.com/india/gaming/1785180/play-by-the-new-rules-indias-2026-online-gaming-law-decoded
- CAclubindia, "India's Online Gaming Revolution: A Complete Guide to the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming w.e.f 1st May, 2026." https://www.caclubindia.com/articles/indias-online-gaming-revolution-a-complete-guide-to-the-promotion-and-regulation-of-online-gaming-wef-1st-may-2026-55118.asp
- https://www.meity.gov.in/static/uploads/2025/10/8a7f103cefc68ed8aaa2ebc9a2ed7c13.pdf
- https://x.com/UNODC/status/2100560453319467298?s=48&t=3CXE-95D2WFgsLsKDkX_Jg
