The picture of a tweet by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in which he says that schools and colleges should reopen from 1 June on an odd-even basis is going viral on social media.
However, The Quint found that he has never tweeted any such thing and that the photo has been morphed.
Schools and colleges have been closed countrywide owing to the nationwide lockdown due to coronavirus.
CLAIM
The photo of the tweet claims that Rahul Gandhi stated that under this odd-even basis, teachers will come on odd days and students on even days.
While some people shared the photo of the tweet, many simply shared Gandhi’s alleged suggestion on Twitter and Facebook.
We found some people sharing the suggestion even without the attribution to Gandhi.
WHAT WE FOUND
We saw that the photo showed that the tweet from Gandhi came at 8:16 pm on 22 May.
However, on searching through Gandhi’s Twitter timeline, we found no trace of any such tweet from 22 May. Below is a photo of his timeline activity from 22 May.
It can be argued that the tweet could have been deleted, but we looked at other red flags that make it evident that the tweet is fake.
As marked in red in the viral photo of the tweet above, the ‘tweet’ seems to have come from a Nokia E75. However, if one looks at Gandhi’s recent tweets, they are done not from a Nokia E75 but an iPhone.
Below is a photo of Gandhi’s tweet about the Karachi PIA plane crash from 22 May itself. It clearly says ‘Twitter for iPhone’, as we have underlined in red.
Moreover, there is the issue of the dateline in the so-called tweet. In the viral photo, the dateline reads ‘22May 20’.
As can be seen above, there is no space between 22 and May and no comma between the date and the year, which is seen in real tweets.
Below is a desktop view of Gandhi’s actual tweet from 22 May. The dateline reads ‘May 22, 2020’.
We also checked a mobile view of the same tweet for an example of its dateline. For Twitter on mobile, the dateline format is 22/05/20, as can be seen below.
It is obvious now that the dateline format on neither desktop nor mobile views matches that of the viral photo.
Further, we found no such news reports of Gandhi having made any such suggestion, which would definitely have been there if Gandhi had tweeted any such thing.
Therefore, it is clear that Gandhi did not tweet this and that the photo has been doctored to mock him.
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