A screenshot of a tweet purportedly shared by President Ram Nath Kovind's account is going viral across social media.
In the image, President Kovind expressed shame on conferring the Padma Shri award to Bollywood actress Kangana Ranaut and asking Prime Minister Narendra Modi for permission to withdraw the award, after her remarks hurt the "sentiments of the country."
The claim comes after the actress made controversial statements regarding India's independence, saying that the country got freedom as alms in 1947 but truly achieved freedom in 2014, when Modi government came to power.
Ranaut received the Padma Shri award, which is one of India's highest civilian honours, along with 101 others.
However, we found that the screenshot was from a fake account. President Ram Nath Kovind's official Twitter account is a verified one that operates under the username '@rashtrapatibhvn', whereas the fake account, which is now suspended, tweeted under the username '@rashtrptibhvn'.
CLAIM
Social media users are sharing the screenshot with Hindi text which reads –
"कंगना रनौत द्वारा की गई टिप्प्पणी देश की भावनाओं को आहत करने वाली है, मै स्वयं उन्हें पद्म पुरस्कार दिए जाने के लिए शर्मिंदगी महसूस कर रहा हूँ!
मेरी सरकार श्री @narendramodi से विनती है कि मुझे पुरस्कार वापस लेने की अनुमति दी जाए।"
[Translation: The remarks made by Kangana Ranaut hurt the sentiments of the country, I myself feel ashamed to have given Padma award to her! I request the Shri @narendramodi government to allow me to withdraw the award.]
An archive of this post can be seen here.
(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)
WHAT WE FOUND
We observed many discrepancies in the screenshot shared. In the claim, the account misspells the word 'President' as 'Prasident' and is not a verified account.
We also noticed that while President Kovind's official verified account operates under the username 'rashtrapatibhvn', this imposter account has 'rashtrptibhvn' as its username.
(Note: Please swipe right to view both images.)
The screenshot shows that the name and username are misspelled.
(Source: Twitter/Altered by The Quint)
On checking Twitter for this imposter handle, we found that the account had been suspended. Next, we used Wayback Machine, an internet archiving website to check for posts made by this account.
We found an archive for the tweet in the claim, dated 12 November 2021.
We found an archive of the suspended profile with the same tweet.
(Source: Wayback Machine/Screenshot)
As per the archived page, this account joined Twitter in November 2020 and is based out of the United States, whereas the President's official verified account joined the platform in July 2017 from New Delhi.
The account also called itself a 'President of India Fan account' in the archived version of the profile.
Evidently, a tweet by a fake account operating under a username similar to that of President Ram Nath Kovind's verified Twitter account was shared by social media users.
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