A screenshot of a X (formerly Twitter) post, purportedly shared by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in 2012, is going viral on social media.
What's in the post?: According to the screenshot, Kejriwal had said, "As a patriot Indian, my head hangs in shame when our corrupt leaders do not appear before ED and CBI even after multiple summons by the investigating agencies, when they should have resigned from their posts immediately as soon as the allegations were made."
Why is it being shared?: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) issued summons for Kejriwal to appear for questioning in connection to the Delhi excise policy case.
The Delhi chief minister has previously been summoned twice by the agency, which Kejriwal dismissed, skipping the questioning altogether.
Responding to the latest (third) summons, the Aam Aadmi Party gave statements that Kejriwal has stepped away for 10 days, without carrying any devices and has not received said summons.
Who shared the screenshot?: Among several social media users, the viral screenshot was shared by Union Minister of Earth Sciences Kiren Rijiju, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Parvesh Sahib Singh, BJP national spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia, and right-wing influencer Rishi Bagree.
BJP Delhi President Virendra Sachdeva also referred to the post in a byte given to the Press Trust of India, while accusing him of "behaving like a criminal."
Had Kejriwal said that?: No. The post in the screenshot is fabricated.
How did we find out?: First, we carried out an advanced search on X to look for posts shared from Kejriwal's official account on 24 November 2012, the date seen in the screenshot.
However, we did not find this, or any other post of this kind on his account.
Next, we looked for archived versions of Kejriwal's X account to see whether he had shared this post back in 2012 but later deleted it. This too, gave us no relevant results.
How do we know it is fake?: For starters, X, which was earlier known as Twitter, was notorious for its low character limit, which only allowed users to share posts with 140 characters.
This limit was increased to 280 characters in 2017, five years after this post – which has 256 characters – was supposedly shared.
This limit was then changed to 4,000 characters after Musk took over. Since April 2023, X Premium subscribers have had the option to pen posts upto 10,000 characters.
In the fake screenshot, there are more formatting and feature discrepancies. We looked at archived versions of posts from other accounts, such as the Times of India's official account, to compare layouts and available features.
Here, we noticed that X did not have 'Like' or 'Repost' as options in 2012, but had 'Favourite' and 'Retweet' instead.
Moreover, the timestamps under the post also used 'AM' and 'PM' to denote the time, something which is not present in the viral screenshot.
Conclusion: A fake screenshot showing a post by Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal is being shared to claim that he posted about being ashamed when "corrupt leaders do not appear before ED and CBI."
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