A tweet shared by an imposter account of news agency ANI has led to many believing that Twitter will shut its operations in India from Wednesday, 26 May.

This comes in the backdrop of the deadline to comply with legal rules meant for social media platforms, which were issued by the government three months ago, coming to an end on Tuesday, 25 May, posing a threat to the operations of the likes of Twitter and Facebook in India.

However, we found that ANI didn’t tweet any such information on its official handle and the viral tweet was from a fake account, which has now been taken down.

Guarantee 

The tweet shared by ‘@ANINewsIndia’ reads: “#Breaking...Twitter will stop operations in India w.e.f 26th May 00:00 hrs. Use of any VPN, third party API will be treated as criminal offence under section 437. 

Several Twitter users including journalist Swati Chaturvedi and Newslaundry Co-Founder Abhinandan Sekhri shared the viral tweet. However, they later took it down.

The archived posts of other social media users sharing the viral claim can be found here, here and here.

‘ANI NEWS INDIA’ IS AN IMPOSTER ACCOUNT OF ANI

We came across the account details of Twitter handle @ANINewslndia with the help of a screenshot shared by Twitter user Karthik Srinivasan.

On comparing the official handle of news agency ANI with the imposter one, we noticed several discrepancies. For instance, the Twitter handle of ANI’s official account is ‘@ANI’ but that of the imposter one is ‘@ANINewslndia’.

The official account is a verified one, has a cover photo, and over five million followers, however, that’s not the case when it comes to the imposter account.

Further, the imposter account was created in 2020, while the official one joined Twitter in 2011.

IMPOSTER ACCOUNT CHANGED DETAILS AFTER BEING CALLED OUT

Firstly, the imposter Twitter account used small ‘L’ and not capital ‘I’ in the word ‘India’ in its handle name ‘@ANINewslndia.’

We searched on Twitter using the imposter account’s handle with small ‘L’ and came across conversations in which the handle had been mentioned.

The imposter account in question changed the name of its account and its Twitter handle to ‘@parodyakkount’ after being called out by several users. In one of the conversations seen below, we noticed ‘@parodyakkount’ being mentioned instead of ‘@ANINewslndia.’

COMPARISON OF VIRAL TWEET WITH THE ONE AFTER IMPOSTER ACCOUNT DETAILS WERE CHANGED

We drew a comparison between the screenshot shared by Karthik Srinivasan of the viral tweet and the one captured by Media people after the account name and handle had been changed and found several similarities.

For instance, the time stamp of 04:39 pm and the dateline are same in both the cases. Even the display picture is the same.

WHAT WERE SOME OF THE LAST TWEETS SHARED BY IMPOSTER ACCOUNT?

A look at some of the last tweets of the account ‘@parodyakkount’ showed that it took a dig at verified accounts falling for the viral tweet. It had also retweeted few tweets that tagged ‘@ANINewslndia’ in them.

I

n conculsion Conclusion
No limit to the number of fake news tweets she makes. Photo from WhatsApp University is pedalled as news. News websites who claim to oh so credible continue to give her column space.