Morphed Pic Claims Rahul Gandhi is World's 3rd Most Trustworthy Leader

We found that media outlet BBC did not publish Rahul Gandhi third most trustworthy politician in the world.

A morphed screenshot of an article published by media outlet BBC is being shared to claim that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has been voted as the third most trustworthy political leader in the world and the information has been attributed to an opinion poll conducted by WIN/ Gallup International Association (GIA).

However, we found that neither BBC publish any such article nor did GIA publish a report claiming the same.

CLAIM

The viral screenshot mentioned that the BBC article, apparently published on 11 January 2016, mentioned that the opinion poll ranked the Congress leader on the third position and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the 69th position.

Several social media users shared the image on Facebook and Twitter and the archived posts can be viewed here, here, here, and here. The claim has been doing the round since 2016.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

We searched on Google with keywords mentioned in the headline and limited the date range between 11 January 2016 to 13 January 2016, in accordance with the dateline mentioned in the viral screenshot.

We also searched on BBC's website using the same keywords, however, it didn't yield any result.

The viral screenshot mentioned snippets of two other stories under the 'Features and Analysis' section, both of which, were published in June 2016 on BBC and can be read here and here.

The viral screenshots mentioned few stories under the section 'Top Stories'. We found that the same text is available on BBC's website.

Further, we compared the viral screenshot with a BBC article published on 11 January 2016 and found a mismatch in the format of the dateline.

While the viral screenshot states '11 Jan 2016', the official article states '11 January 2016'. The dateline format has remained consistent as can be seen in the article published in January 2020 and January 2021.

WHAT ABOUT THE GALLUP SURVEY?

Gallup International Association (GIA), registered in Switzerland's Zurich, published annual reports in 2017 and 2018 wherein the organisation conducted a survey and asked the respondents to 'indicate whether you have a very favourable, somewhat favourable, somewhat unfavourable or very unfavourable opinion of each of the following world leaders?'

It is pertinent to note that Rahul Gandhi does not feature in any of these reports. Meanwhile Prime Minister Narendra Modi ranked third in 2017 survey and secured fourth position in the 2018 survey.

Evidently, a morphed screenshot of a BBC article was shared to falsely claim that Rahul Gandhi has been voted as the third most trustworthy political leader in the world.

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