Around the time that Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Mohan Charan Majhi was declared the Chief Minister designate of Odisha after its recently concluded polls, several X (formerly Twitter) accounts cropped up with his name.
Majhi, who took oath on 12 June, is Odisha's first chief minister from the BJP.
In this report, we examine some of the accounts that social media users have interacted with, believing them to be Majhi's account. These accounts have also gained followers by impersonating Majhi.
Account 1: '@MohanCMajhiBJP'
This first account with the username '@MohanCMajhiBJP' had joined the platform in November 2023, and only had 'Jai Jagannath' along with the Indian flag and a heart emoji as its bio.
The banner image on this account reads 'Indian Cricket Team'.
What kind of posts does it share?: We combed through this profile to look at the kind of content it was sharing.
It shared a screenshot of a post discussing the ongoing ICC Men's T20 World Cup, which mentioned that India was playing against Pakistan the same day as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's swearing-in on 4 June.
The post, which pondered whether India would win, was shared with a hashtag referring to Modi as 'Panauti' (bad luck).
It would be out of the ordinary for a BJP leader to refer to PM Modi in this manner.
We also noticed that this account had shared posts in multiple languages, which spoke about various topics.
These included a Telugu post about the late businessman Ramoji Rao, a Japanese post about food, a Hindi post criticising the news of actor Sonakshi Sinha's nuptials, among others.
(Swipe to view posts.)
It shared posts in Telugu.
(Source: X/Screenshot)
It also appeared to show support for Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) personnel Kulwinder Kaur, the jawan who reportedly slapped BJP MP Kangana Ranaut at an airport.
Six days before Majhi assumed his position as chief minister, the profile had changed its photograph to one of a young woman.
Account history: On scrolling further, we came across a post shared 19 May, where the user thanked people for helping it reach 5,000 followers.
In the screenshot accompanying the post, the account's username reflected as '@TeamIndia___'
When we looked for posts sent to this account, we saw that all responses showed the account impersonating Majhi.
Using Wayback Machine, we looked for archives of posts shared by '@TeamIndia___', which led us to several old posts.
On comparing the 16-digit unique code for this account to the one we found for '@MohanCMajhiBJP', we found that the two were the same.
This confirms that the account impersonating Majhi used to be an account with the username '@TeamIndia___'.
Account 2: '@MohanManjhi4BJP'
We came across another account in Majhi's name, which misspelled the last name as 'Manjhi' in the username - '@MohanManjhi4BJP'.
The account's bio also states that it a parody account.
Posts shared: Repeating the same process, we went through the account to look at the kind of posts that were shared.
One post called actor and BJP MP from Mathura, Hema Malini, the "most useless" member of parliament.
It also shared several posts supporting the BJP, such as this one speaking positively about PM Modi and Sushil Modi.
During our search, we came across a post that the user had shared, calling Nepal's government "communist" and "funded by China."
The post shared had tagged '@ashuawasthi01' and '@TimesAlgebraIND'.
When we explored the thread, we saw that the user had actually responded to the account impersonating Majhi.
Account history: When we looked for posts sent to '@ashuawasthi01', X showed posts sent to 'MohanManjhi4BJP'.
The unique ID for the account associated with 'MohanManjhi4BJP' was 1546818571095113729.
This number matched with the user code found on archived posts shared by 'ashuawasthi01'.
Majhi's official accounts: The Department of Information and Public Relations for the state of Odisha shared the chief minister's real accounts on social media platforms.
It mentioned that the account '@MohanMOdisha' was CM Majhi's real account on X.
Conclusion: The X accounts with the usernames '@MohanCMajhiBJP' and 'MohanManjhi4BJP' are fake ones impersonating Odisha CM Mohan Majhi.
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