The internet has no memory. It’s a goldfish bowl with a 5G connection, where yesterday’s trauma is today’s "breaking news" and everything old is eventually sold back to us as brand new. If you’ve spent any time on the toxic sludge piles we call social media lately, you’ve probably seen it: a grainy, vertical video of Bollywood veteran Rajpal Yadav looking humbled, thanking Salman Khan for his support after a stint in Tihar Jail.

People are losing their minds. They’re tagging "Bhai," dropping prayer emojis, and asking if Yadav just walked free this morning. It’s a compelling narrative of redemption and celebrity brotherhood. It’s also complete, unadulterated nonsense.

Rajpal Yadav isn't in Tihar. He hasn’t been for years. But in the current attention economy, the truth is just a speed bump on the way to a viral hit.

Let’s look at the facts, though facts feel increasingly like an optional DLC in the modern web experience. Back in 2018, Yadav was indeed sentenced to three months in prison. It wasn’t a high-speed chase or a drug bust. It was a five-crore rupee loan (roughly $600,000) that went sideways. He defaulted, the legal system ground its gears, and he ended up in Delhi’s infamous Tihar. He served his time and was released in early 2019. He’s spent the last five years working, doing press tours, and—one assumes—staying far away from high-interest debt.

So why is this clip haunting your feed now?

Because the algorithm is a scavenger. It doesn’t care about timestamps. It only cares about engagement metrics. Someone, somewhere, dug up a five-year-old video of Yadav expressing gratitude to Salman Khan—who famously supported him during that legal quagmire—and stripped it of its context. They didn't add a "Throwback Thursday" hashtag. They just uploaded it with a "Breaking" caption and let the platform’s recommendation engine do the dirty work.

This is the "Zombie News" phenomenon. It’s a specific kind of digital friction where the sheer volume of content makes it impossible for the average user to distinguish between a live stream and a historical archive. We’re living in a perpetual present. On TikTok and Reels, a video from 2018 and a video from 2024 look identical. They occupy the same pixels. They trigger the same outrage or sympathy.

The trade-off for this instant connectivity is a total loss of chronological literacy. When we see a celebrity in distress, our lizard brains don't think to check the metadata. We just share. We click. We comment. Each of those actions is a micro-transaction that pays the uploader and the platform, even if the information is objectively rotting.

The clip in question is a masterclass in emotional manipulation. It leverages Salman Khan’s massive, fiercely loyal fanbase—a group that will amplify anything with his name on it—to push a false narrative of current events. It turns a resolved legal issue into a fresh scandal for the sake of a few thousand "likes." It’s a cheap trick, but in a world where attention is the only currency that matters, cheap tricks are the primary export.

Yadav himself has moved on. He’s been busy trying to reclaim his spot as the king of comic timing in an industry that has changed drastically since his heyday. To have his lowest point dragged back into the light for a bunch of "For You Page" views is more than just annoying; it’s a form of digital harassment sanctioned by the platforms’ refusal to police outdated content.

If Meta or ByteDance actually cared about the quality of information on their services, they’d have a system to flag recycled news. They’d see a video that’s been indexed a million times before and slap a "historical context" label on it. But they won't. Why would they? A confused user stays on the app longer than a well-informed one. Friction creates heat, and heat generates revenue.

So, no, Rajpal Yadav is not currently sitting in a cell in Delhi. He’s likely at home, perhaps wondering why his phone is blowing up with messages about a debt he settled half a decade ago. He’s a victim of a system that rewards the resurrection of dead news because the living truth isn't quite loud enough.

We’re all just shouting at ghosts in an echo chamber, convinced that the haunting is a news flash. How many more times are we going to "free" a man who’s already been walking the streets for five years?