CLAIM: Social media is buzzing with a story about Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal being accused of raping a woman in the hostel of the India Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, where he went to pursue engineering in 1987. The circulated clipping of the English daily The Telegraph carried a story with the headline: 'IIT student accused of rape'.
This is not the first time the story and the clipping has done the rounds on social media. Here is what people have been sharing on Twitter:
TRUE OR FALSE?
The news about the Delhi chief minister being accused of rape is false. How do we know?
While trying to verify the credibility of this clipping, we stumbled upon a tool to generate newspaper clippings in which one can alter the text, header, name of the paper, date and day. This tool is free and lets you generate a plausible image of a newspaper article.
But there’s a giveaway – the first two columns of the news report changes to whatever the user inputs, but the third mostly hidden column that is only partially visible and the text on that column, never changes.
The next giveaway was the fishy location band. While the clipping of the Kejriwal rape story shows the place line to be just 'Kharagpur’ with no date, an original archive image of the daily shows that the paper’s location band is written with the date, 'New Delhi, June 1:'.
Another difference in the style sheet of both articles was the breaking of the paragraph as circled in the image. The original archive image shows no spacing between the two paragraphs, while very clear spacing can be seen in the clipping of the rape story naming AAP chief.
Similar clippings of the fake rape story involving Arvind Kejriwal have been shared by many on social media before, in 2016.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)