Amid Hijab Row in Karnataka, Impostor Account of Muskan Khan Crops Up

We found that the earlier username of the account was '@amantweets60' which has now been changed to 'muskanind3467'.

With the video of Muskan Khan, the girl who had confronted a mob of saffron-clad boys chanting 'Jai Shri Ram' in Karnataka's Mandya, going viral, a Twitter profile in her name has surfaced.

At the time of writing the story, the account had amassed over 5,000 followers. The tweets posted by this account included one thanking 'Sikhs of Khalistan' for supporting her, another thanking the 'Taliban spokesperson' and one apologising to Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

However, we found that the account is an imposter. The earlier account was in the name of one 'Aman Tweets' and the username was '@amantweets60'. The location of the account was mentioned as 'Pakistan' and the bio mentioned that it was an account of a 'social media activist Aman Ullah.'

WHAT IS THE ACCOUNT TWEETING ABOUT?

The Twitter handle has the photo of Muskan and the cover photo is an image of Muskan speaking to reporters.

The Twitter username reads '@muskanind3467' and the bio reads 'Official account Muskan Khan Muslim Karnataka India'.

In another tweet, the caption read, "Thanks to the Afghan Taliban spokesman who supported me (sic)".

In another tweet from 10 February, the caption read, "Thanks to the Sikhs of Khalistan movement for supporting me."

IF NOT MUSKAN KHAN, THEN WHO?

While going through the tweets on the the Twitter timeline of 'Muskan', we found some replies to one account '@AmanTweets60'.

We then looked up for the account on Twitter and found a host of replies to '@muskanind3467' and also to '@amantweets60'. When we hovered over one of the replies, which mentioned '@amantweets60', we could see the current profile which now identifies itself as Muskan Khan.

TWITTER ID: DOES THAT MATCH?

Remember, a Twitter ID is unique to each account and no two accounts can have the same ID.

So, we checked the Twitter ID of the existing account which is in the name of 'Muskan', using Tweeterid.com. The ID is: 1481195182267977738.

We then searched for '@amantweets60's' archives using WayBack Machine, an archiving tool which also helps locate existing archives.

Here, we found multiple archives, which we used to check the Twitter ID of the profile.

And, we found that the two IDs matched.

The Twitter ID of '@amantweets60' and 'Muskanind3467' is 1481195182267977738.

Further, we found an archive of a tweet, from 8 February (7:49 am) which is exactly the same tweet which is on the current profile but carried a different time stamp.

It can be argued that the tweet was copy-pasted but, given the evidence above, it is clear that the profile is not of Muskan Khan.

MISINFORMATION TARGETING MUSKAN KHAN AND THE HIJAB ROW

The Quint's WebQoof team has earlier debunked multiple claims surrounding Muskan Khan and the ongoing protest.

In one of the claims, Muskan Khan's pictures were shared alongside the pictures of Janata Dal (Secular) Karnataka member Najma Nazeer Chikkanerale, to claim that she doesn't wear a hijab outside college and that wearing it to college was "propaganda."

In another claim, Rahul Gandhi who was meeting a Jharkhand MLA Amba Prasad was shared with the claim that Prasad was Muskan. You can read the fact-check here.

Another claim was made about the hoisting of a saffron flag at a Karnataka college to say that the national flag was removed to do so.

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