Video Editor: Rahul Sanpui
Screenshots of fake tweets are circulating on social media as actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s last message. The tweets which were allegedly posted a few hours before his death, and subsequently deleted, talk about his mental health and why he is ending his life.
CLAIM
One of the viral tweets read: “I'm ending all this for good. Going far yet so close to you people. Maybe after this people try to communicate with others rather than holding onto the thoughts. See ya at the other side. GoodBye (sic).”
Hindi News channel Aaj Tak also carried a story on these tweets. However, the story has now been taken down.
An organisation which goes by the name of ‘Newstrack’ too published an article on the same.
The tweets have also been shared on Facebook.
The Quint received multiple queries on the claim being made in the tweets on its WhatsApp helpline.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
There are a number of red flags in the tweets which make it evident that the screenshots are fake. Let’s take a look at them one by one:
1. DIFFERENT FONTS USED IN ONE TWEET
If one notices carefully, there are different fonts being used in the viral tweet as far as the dateline, name of the Twitter user and text of the tweet are concerned.
When one changes the font on an Android phone, the font of the entire tweet changes and not just one element.
We tried it on an Android phone as the screenshots mention ‘Twitter for Android’.
2. ANALYSING THE DATELINE
The second red flag was the dateline itself.
The date mentioned in the tweet reads ‘14 jun 20’ which is not the format. A tweet when viewed on the desktop has the dateline written as Jun 12, 2020, on Tweetdeck it reads 12 Jun 2020 while on the mobile app it reads 12 Jun 20.
Now the only time the letter ‘J’ can be in lower case is when we change the language settings. But on doing that, the language of the below mentioned ‘View Tweet Activity’ shall also change which didn’t happen in this case.
While changing the language, Twitter prompts a message that reads: “Select your preferred language for headlines, buttons, and other text from Twitter on this account. This does not change the language of the content you see in your timeline.”
This states that while the language of the content remains unchanged, all other text from Twitter changes.
We changed the languages and saw that both the datelines and ‘View Tweet Activity’ have been changed.
3. GAP BETWEEN TWITTER HANDLE AND TEXT
We also compared the gap between the Twitter handle and text of the viral tweet with another tweet shared by an android phone.
We noticed that the gap is way more in the viral tweet as compared to the one seen in a tweet on mobile, TweetDeck and desktop view.
Also, as per Sushant Singh Rajput’s Twitter profile, his last tweet was on 27 December 2019.
We also viewed the archived history of the account on an application called ‘Wayback Machine’ and didn't find any tweet which was posted after that. It can be argued that the tweets might have been deleted but as proven above, these screenshots are manipulated and don’t show the late actor’s last tweet.
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