Rahul Gandhi’s Tweet on Not Bowing Down to the ED Is Fake

We found no trace of Rahul Gandhi sharing the tweet in the screenshot, which shows several inconsistencies.

The screenshot is morphed and Gandhi shared no such tweet.

(Source: Facebook/Altered by The Quint)

A screenshot of a tweet purportedly shared by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi's verified Twitter account is doing the rounds on social media.

The tweet, which is in Hindi, roughly translates to, "The ED wants me to bow down but I will not do it. I know everything about what they want me to do."

The screenshot comes as Gandhi began the fourth round of questioning in connection with the National Herald case, as the Enforcement Directorate (ED) probes into alleged financial irregularities in the party-promoted group Young Indian – which owns the newspaper.

However, the tweet is fake. We did not find any proof to back the existence of the tweet and the screenshot in the claim carries multiple errors when compared to the format of an actual tweet.

CLAIM

Social media users are sharing the screenshot of the tweet on social media, believing it to be a tweet from the Congress leader's account.

An archived version of this tweet can be accessed here.

(Source: Twitter/Altered by The Quint)

Archived versions of more posts with the same claim can be seen here, here, and here.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

First, we checked Rahul Gandhi's verified Twitter profile to check for the tweet, but did not find it there. We only found one tweet dated 16 June, which spoke about the Agnipath scheme.

Next, we checked internet archiving websites Wayback Machine and Archive.is for records of the tweet, in case it had been deleted. Neither of them showed any records of the tweet's existence.

We carefully observed the layout of the tweet, and found that it resembled a screenshot taken from an Android device.

On comparing the screenshot in question to one of the tweet shared from Gandhi's account on 16 June, we found a few discrepancies between the formats of the two screenshots.

We saw that the distance between the tweet's body and the username was more in the screenshot of the claim, as compared to the screenshot we took for comparison.

There are inconsistencies between both screenshots.

(Source: Twitter/Altered by The Quint)

We also saw that there was a small dot separating the time and date information in the screenshot we took, but it was missing in the photo from the claim.

Moreover, the option to translate the tweet's contents was not visible in the claim, despite both tweets containing text in Hindi.

The 'translate tweet' option shows up in non-English language tweets.

(Source: Twitter/Altered by The Quint)

We then changed our device's system language to Hindi to check whether that would affect the 'translate' option's presence, but it made no difference as the option showed up regardless of the device's language settings.

Evidently, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi did not tweet about not bowing down to the Enforcement Directorate. The screenshot being shared on social media is a morphed one and has several inconsistencies with how posts appear on Twitter.

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