Actor Naseeruddin Shah has been vocal about his stand against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA). More than 300 prominent individuals, including Shah, Mira Nair and Nandita Das, have signed an open letter expressing their solidarity over the nationwide protests by students against CAA and the National Register of Citizens (NRC).
CLAIM
Now, a tweet shared by an account alleged to be of Naseeruddin Shah’s, in response to Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, mentions that the actor has called for support towards Kashmiris and that he has asked to decide a date to show that “we are in this fight against our oppressive government together.”
On 24 January, Imran Khan had asked Pakistan to show its support towards Kashmiris on 5 February.
The tweet, claimed to be of Naseeruddin Shah’s, had garnered over 6,800 likes and 1,700 retweets at the time of publishing the article.
Another tweet shared by the same account mentions that Pakistan is a “safer country” for minorities as compared to India.
WHAT’S THE TRUTH?
Actor Ratna Pathak Shah, Naseeruddin Shah's wife, confirmed to The Quint that the actor doesn’t not have any Twitter account and that the account in question is fake.
Naseeruddin Shah himself too released a statement on his Instagram profile that corroborates with the aforementioned details.
We searched the text of the tweet on Google and found that the same text was shared by ad filmmaker Ram Subramanian on 24 January, in response to Imran Khan’s aforementioned tweet.
But, the account alleged to be that of Naseeruddin Shah shared the same text on 25 January.
ABOUT THE FAKE TWITTER ACCOUNT
As per the Twitter bio of the account, it was created in September 2019. However, when we searched on Twitter using the handle’s name @NaserUdDinShah, we found that several users had tagged the same account before 2019 as well, with the handle’s name being @NaseruddinShah.
We could find tweets tagging @NaseruddinShah dating back to 6 September 2012, till 16 February 2019. The next search result is dated 25 January with the Twitter handle being @NaserUdDinShah.
Further, using TweetBeaver, an application that can be used to analyse Twitter handles, we entered @NaseruddinShah but the search result automatically showed the screen name as @NaserUdDinShah, which is the present name of the Twitter handle.
Also, the account's name has some factual errors. The actor spells his name as ‘Naseeruddin Shah,’ but both @NaseruddinShah and @NaserUdDinShah have used incorrect spelling of the name. The Twitter handle @NaserUdDinShah is not even a verified account.
Thus, a fake Twitter account is falsely attributing the information shared by the account to actor Naseeruddin Shah.
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