The screenshot of a tweet purpotedly by Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav has gone viral in which he is talking about Aparna Yadav's decision of joining the BJP ahead of the upcoming 2022 Uttar Pradesh Assembly Elections.
Aparna Yadav joined the BJP on Wednesday, 19 January, in the presence of Uttar Pradesh BJP party chief Swatantra Dev Singh and Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya.
We found that the tweet, made by the handle called @akhileshyadav, was from an impostor account and was digitally edited to add a verified sign. Akhilesh's original Twitter handle is @yadavakhilesh.
CLAIM
The tweet when translated to English from Hindi read, "BJP thinks that they will defeat us by taking our daughter-in-law onto their side but they should know that Vibhishana can get "Ravana" killed only once and not every time. Of course we are Yaduvanshi but we have read the 'Ramayana' too. Even today's "Vibhishana" does not know where the nectar is hidden in our navel."
An archive of the post can be found here.
(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We went to Akhilesh's Twitter handle to check for tweets made on 19 January but didn't find the viral tweet. He had posted only one tweet on that day, which talked about a welfare scheme.
We then observed the viral tweet and found that the handle menioned in the viral tweet was "@akhileshyadav", whereas Akhilesh's original Twitter handle is called "@yadavakhilesh".
When we looked up the profile, we found that the profile had been suspended by Twitter. We also compared the viral tweet with an original tweet from Akhilesh's handle and found minor errors in the formatting, such as the date and time stamp did not have a "." between them.
Comparison of viral tweet with an original tweet.
(Photo: Altered by The Quint)
We also looked for news reports to see what Akhilesh had to say about Aparna joining the BJP and found a byte on news agency ANI.
Akhilesh Yadav congratulated her and said that he is happy that the party's ideology is developing and spreading. But he didn't talk about anything written in the viral tweet.
Clearly, a tweet made by an impostor account was edited to falsely claim that Akhilesh Yadav tweeted about his sister-in-law joining the BJP.
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