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| - Fact Check: Presidential candidate Droupadi Murmu is not on Twitter but many accounts are impersonating her
As soon as Droupadi Murmu was announced as NDA's presidential candidate, over a dozen Twitter accounts with photos of Murmu emerged. But which one of them is the real account?
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India Today Fact Check
Droupadi Murmu does not have a Twitter account. Following her candidacy’s announcement, many Twitter accounts impersonating Murmu have surfaced. Some of them were created in June 2022.
As soon as Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated Droupadi Murmu for being nominated as the National Democratic Alliance's presidential candidate, a Twitter account — Draupadi Murmu (@DraupdiMurmuBJP) — responded on Twitter, thanking him.
Murmu, who was the first tribal woman to complete a full term as Jharkhand governor, may likely break another glass ceiling by becoming the President. Former Union Minister Yashwant Sinha was selected as the joint Opposition candidate for the upcoming presidential elections.
But even as people on social media discussed the presidential candidate, over a dozen Twitter with photos of Murmu, claimed to be her. But which one of them is the real account?
AFWA confirmed that none of the Twitter accounts that claimed to be Murmu belonged to the ex-Governor. They are all impersonating her. Murmu, it turns out, does not have a Twitter account at all.
AFWA Probe
Multiple Twitter accounts mimicking Murmu surfaced on social media as soon as the Bharatiya Janata Party-led NDA declared her as their nominee for the upcoming presidential elections.
AFWA reached out to Murmu’s office over the phone in Odisha. Suraj Kumar Mahato, Murmu’s personal assistantconfirmed that she does not have a Twitter account. “All these accounts are fake. She has no social media presence,” he said.
We noticed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s congratulatory tweet for Droupadi Murmu as the NDA candidate on June 21 did not tag any Twitter account, which is otherwise done in the case of important people.
Since Murmu does not have any Twitter account, Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik congratulated her in a tweet by using the hashtag #DraupadiMurmu.
Varying names and spellings
Scanning Twitter, we found around 17 Twitter handles with various spellings, ranging from “@dhraupadimurmu” to “@draupadi_murmu”, “@DraupadiMurmure”, and “@DraupadiMurmu_” to “@Draupadimurm”.
A few of these accounts declared themselves as parody accounts in their bios. The others, however, claimed to be the real deal.
Newborn accounts
We found that there are multiple accounts in the name of Murmu, which were recently created.
Twitter handles like “@PresidentMurmu”, “@DraupadiiMurmu”, “@DraupadiMurmu_9”, “@murmu_draupadi”, “@Draupadi_Murmu_”, and more were all created in June 2022.
These newly-formed accounts have on average five to ten followers. They usually post pro-BJP content, and almost all of them have responded to Prime Minister’s congratulatory tweet impersonating Murmu.
Old fake accounts with multiple avatars
Unlike the newborn accounts, there are a few Twitter accounts impersonating Murmu which have over ten thousand followers. We analysed two such accounts. Both these accounts were a couple of years old.
The Twitter account @DraupdiMurmuBJP showed a follower base of over twenty-nine thousand and was created in September 2021. Every Twitter account has a unique id number that remains the same even if the user name or screen name changes.
With the help of TweeterID ( https://tweeterid.com/ ), we found that this account’s ID number is “1433340051363176450”. But when we searched for more information about this ID number on Google we found one result that indicated this ID number was earlier used by a Twitter handle “@shikhasrajput”, which is now inactive.
With the help of an advanced search on Twitter, we tried to find other accounts’ interactions with “@shikhasrajput”. Surprisingly, the results led us to several replies that target both “@shikhasrajput” and “@DraupdiMurmuBJP” in June this year, thus proving both Twitter accounts have the same ID — and that “@DraupdiMurmuBJP” is the new avatar of “@shikhasrajput”, as the latter does not exist now.
Another impersonating account with nearly twelve thousand followers — “@DraupadiMurmure”— was created in October 2021. Further investigation into this Twitter handle with the ID number “1445261938041098250” revealed that it had multiple avatars earlier.
Prior to impersonating Murmu, we found that this account impersonated Bahujan Samaj Party leader and advocate Seema Samridhi Kushwaha. We used the same method for searching the Twitter ID on Google that led us to the Twitter handle “@SeemajKushwah”. We found this handle is non-existent now.
But a simple Google search with “@SeemajKushwah” led us to a Tweet from January this year where “@SeemajKushwah” was tagged with the claim that she had joined the BSP. Another person replied saying that the official account of Kushwaha is “@Seemasamridhi”. Thus it was clear that this account that earlier impersonated Kushwaha is now impersonating Murmu.
A Twitter user “The Cronology” claimed that the same Twitter ID “1445261938041098250” previously claimed to be Raviprakash Khorwal (RaviprakashKho2, Ravikhorwa), and L.R. Bamniya (lilarammeghwalj). We have found digital traces of these Twitter handles that are now defunct.
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