A purported tweet by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kailasa (fugitive god-man Swami Nithyananda's island nation) which condemns "Indian politicians" for making defamatory comments against Prophet Muhammad, has gone viral.
The tweet comes while India is facing severe diplomatic backlash from several Muslims countries including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, because of the comments made by suspended Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Spokesperson Nupur Sharma and a tweet by the former media head of the party's Delhi unit, Naveen Jindal.
The tweet was shared by several users and news agencies HW News and One India Tamil carried a news report on the same.
However, we found that the tweet was from a fake account whose previous handle was ‘@shrutisharmaIAS.’
THE CLAIM
The viral tweet condemned Indian politicians and added that it had summoned the High Commissioner of India to Kailasa.
"Kailasa welcomed the decision by the ruling party to suspend the party's officials due to their provocative remarks that has generated rage among Muslim Ummah," the tweet added.
An archive of the tweet can be found here.
(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)
News agency HW News put out a story based on the tweet along with a card. The card was later shared by several Facebook users. One India Tamil also put out a story based on the tweet.
An archive of the tweet can be found here.
(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We looked up the Twitter account of The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kailasa (@MoFA_Kailasa) and saw that while the user joined the microblogging site in October 2021, it only had three tweets from 6 June.
While going through the replies under the tweet, we saw a person mention that the account was earlier called "@shurtiSharmaIAS."
An archive of the reply can be found here.
(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)
Taking a cue from that, we looked up archives of the account of "@shurtiSharmaIAS" on Wayback Machine, a digital archiving website, and found a tweet from 31 May.
We checked the Twitter user ID of the same, which was 1444720326202441731. The Twitter ID of any account is a unique value that can't be changed even when the user changes its handle.
Archived tweet of the old account and the user id.
(Source: Wayback Machine/Screenshot)
We then checked the Twitter ID of @MoFA_Kailasa (the current account) and found that the Twitter ID was also 1444720326202441731.
Twitter ID of @MoFA_Kailasa.
(Source: Tweeterid/Screenshot)
We then looked for verified Twitter handles of Kailasa's foreign ministry and didn't find any. The Twitter account mentioned on the official website of Kailasa linked back to Swami Nithyananda's Twitter account. We found a tweet on the account which said that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs account was a fake one.
A link to the archive can be found here.
(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)
Evidently, several social media users and news organisations HW News and One India Tamil fell for a tweet posted by a fake account of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kailasa.
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