That Tweet Lauding Kangana Ranaut is by an Impostor Account, Not Raj Thackeray

The screenshot of the tweet is from a now-deleted fake account created under the name of MNS leader Raj Thackeray.

A screenshot of a tweet purportedly shared by Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) leader Raj Thackeray praising Bollywood actor Kangana Ranaut while putting down Kareena Kapoor Khan is being shared across social media platforms.

Calling Ranaut brave, the tweet says that Babur would not have succeeded in India if we had more women like her.

However, we found that the tweet was not shared by Raj Thackeray's official account. The account in the screenshot has the username '@iRajthackerey', which misspells the leader's name: the account has now been deleted.

CLAIM

In the viral screenshot, the tweet states that if there were women as brave as Ranaut, Mughal emperor Babur would not have been able to succeed, but there were more women like Kareena Kapoor Khan, they fell to their knees and birthed 'Taimurs'.

This post by Facebook page 'Zee News Global Fans' was liked more than 3,200 times and shared by nearly 200 users at the time of writing this article.

Archived versions of more claims across social media can be seen here, here and here.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

Upon carefully observing the screenshot, we saw that the username whose account purportedly shared the tweet was '@iRajthackerey', which misspelled the leader's last name.

(Note: Please swipe right to view both images)

It must be noted that the MNS chief's verified Twitter account has the username '@RajThackeray'.

Further, we checked Thackeray's Twitter timeline and did not find any post that commented on Ranaut and Khan.

To check the possibility of a deleted tweet, we checked Wayback Machine for archives of the account from September 2020 and did not find any such post.

We then looked for the account 'iRajthackerey' on Twitter, but found that it had been deleted.

Next, we searched the archiving website for tweets from the account 'iRajthackerey' and found an archived version of the tweet in the claim, dated 5 September 2020.

While the viral screenshot shows the date as '06 Sep 20', the archived version of the same tweet reflects the date as 5 September. This discrepancy in the date of both tweets is related to Wayback Machine's archiving system.

Team WebQoof attempted to archive an old post from the Thackeray's verified account and noted that the archived version's date was a day off from the post, like in the claim.

While Thackeray's actual account had joined Twitter in May 2017, this imposter account was created in September 2020.

Clearly, a screenshot of a tweet from a now-deleted imposter account of MNS leader Raj Thackeray went viral on social media, claiming that the leader had commented on Bollywood actresses Kangana Ranaut and Kareena Kapoor Khan.

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