Did Narendra Modi tweet this?

Question

This post on facebook claims that Narendra Modi tweeted:

Dear HSC students please don't get upset with your results. Remember i am a chai wala & Arvind Kejriwal is from IIT Kharagpur
#HSCresults2k17

— 2:29 PM 31 Mar 14

(Here "chai wala" means tea seller.)

Did he (or his social media handling group or whatever) really tweet this? Is this a real tweet?

Here is another similar claim https://twitter.com/nupurbhatt2/status/869244367285792768 but I *really* don't see how this fits on this site. — tripleee, May 30 '17 at 13:49
The profile picture on https://twitter.com/narendramodi is different so I would lean towards a bluff. — tripleee, May 30 '17 at 13:52
Because not every photoshopped forgery of a notable person is itself notable. — tripleee, Jun 03 '17 at 13:27
But it is not clear if it's photoshopped or not, right? That's the point of this site, is it not - to tell the photoshopped from the unphotoshopped? — Truth-seek, Jun 03 '17 at 13:30
i'm questioning whether it's sufficiently notable. I don't think every high school prank needs to be separately rebuffed here; that would lower the signal to noise ratio for most readers of this site. — tripleee, Jun 03 '17 at 13:39

DenisS · Accepted Answer · 2017-11-13T15:47:02.997

21

This tweet is almost definitely fake, for multiple reasons.

According to the screenshot, the tweet was sent on March 31st, 2014.

Taking a look at Mr. Modi's tweets between Mar 30 and April 1 2014 reveals no tweets that contains that content.
The image linked uses the hashtag "#HSCresults2k17". It is HIGHLY unlikely that Mr. Modi would be tweeting using a hashtag regarding high school test results in 2017 in March of 2014.
A search for posts using #HSCResults2017 and #hscresults2017 returns no matching tweets. Other spellings do not return any results.
The text

Dear HSC students please don't get upset with your results. Remember i am a chai wala & Arvind Kejriwal is from IIT Kharagpur #HSCresults2k17

is 141 characters:

While some Twitter accounts can post 280 character messages, this feature did not exist when the Tweet was reported (May 2017) or when the timestamp says it was posted (March 2014)

edited Nov 13 '17 at 15:47

answered May 30 '17 at 13:56

DenisS

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Tweets can be deleted so the currently visible history is not sufficient proof as such. https://politwoops.eu/ collects deleted tweets by politicians but the focus seems to be in Europe. – tripleee May 30 '17 at 14:01
https://www.politwoops.com/p/unknown/narendramodi displays an empty results but that of course is inconclusive as well. – tripleee May 30 '17 at 14:06
12

Judging by the difference in quality (compression artifacts) between the tweeted text and everything else (name, date, retweets, etc) this seems to be a (fairly badly) forged imaged. This is in addition to everything that Denis Stallings has pointed out. Especially number 2 and 4. – Syzygy Jun 01 '17 at 13:10
2

@Syzygy https://i.stack.imgur.com/3VVcX.png – Philipp Jun 01 '17 at 19:10
@Philipp I can only see an outline of an empty box from my iPhone. Is it a "I think this is a photoshop" image, with someone straddling a shark firing a gun? – Andrew Grimm Jun 05 '17 at 11:01
2

@AndrewGrimm it's an obviously fake screenshot of a tweet sent by Modi that says "Whoever faked that tweet doesn't seem to know what the debugging tools of their web browser can do" – DenisS Jun 05 '17 at 13:23
Is that "follow us on facebook Mr satyavadi" even a real thing for twitter? I don't really use twitter; but that seems to be some sort of watermark or something added on externally to twitter. – JMac Jun 05 '17 at 13:40
@JMac The watermark is added by the page that shared it on Facebook to everything they post. Distasteful, if the thing you're watermarking is not you're own work, but not proof for or against the veracity of a screenshot. – IMSoP Jun 08 '17 at 11:37

Did Narendra Modi tweet this?

1 Answers1