A screenshot of a tweet posted by US President Donald J Trump has gone viral, claiming that he confused football legend Diego Maradona with iconic American singer and songwriter Madonna.
However, we found that the tweet was morphed and Trump didn’t tweet about Maradona after the footballer’s death on Wednesday, 25 November.
CLAIM
One of the captions with the viral photo read, “Donald Trump is still in his delusional state of mind after losing the US presidential election. He's so confused not only on the election result but also the death of Diego Maradona that he thought was Madonna the Ameican [sic.] singer and songwriter.”
People used similar captions to share the viral photo on Facebook and Twitter.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We went through Donald Trump’s Twitter feed and didn’t see the viral tweet on it.
A website that archives all of Trump’s tweets also didn’t have any record of a tweet on Maradona. Additionally, ProPublica, a US-based nonprofit organisation, which maintains a repository of all the deleted tweets by Trump didn’t have any trace of this tweet.
We then did a keyword search for “Donald Trump + Madonna” and found that the singer had been trending online because some people confused her with the footballer.
We then analysed the viral tweet with a real tweet on Trump’s feed. While comparing the viral tweet with Trump’s tweet on the mobile application, we saw four big errors:
- The share button on the phone is different on the mobile application as compared to the viral tweet.
- The number of retweets, quote tweets and likes appear separately and not next to the buttons.
- The Twitter handle and time was in different positions as compared to a real tweet.
- The position of the number of interactions was also not aligned with the text of the tweet.
We also found errors while comparing the viral tweet with the desktop version of a real tweet.
This time, the share button was the same as in the viral tweet. However, the position of time and the Twitter handle were again off, as compared to a real tweet. While in a real tweet, the time is mentioned under the text, in the viral photo, the time and the handle were next to the name.
The number of interactions was also found to be above the buttons in the real tweet.
We also compared the viral tweet with a real tweet on Twitter’s mobile view. We found similar errors while comparing with the website version. The Twitter handle and the time stamp were not in the right place and the number of interactions was also not next to the buttons. The alignment, too, was not right.
We also compared it with a tweet on Tweetdeck, a social media dashboard application for management of Twitter accounts. While there were a couple of similarities in this view, we found errors here as well.
The name and time stamp was in the right place as the Tweetdeck screenshot and the number of interactions was next to the buttons on the Tweetdeck screen.
However, the share button was missing in the Tweetdeck’s version and was replaced by a “...” button. The alignment of the text of the tweet and that of the interaction was again off.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison also fell victim to this hoax when people shared the tweet from a parody account, claiming that Morrison had confused Maradona with Madonna. Morrison’s Twitter handle is @ScottMorrisonMP.
Evidently, a morphed photograph was shared to falsely claim that US President Donald Trump has mistaken late football legend Diego Maradona with American singer and songwriter Madonna.
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