On September 26, Rajasthan Youth Congress shared a screenshot of an alleged survey by Times Now where Rahul Gandhi was shown as the top-rated leader to have ‘Positive Sentiment Across Twitter.
In the image shared by Rajasthan Youth Congress and other Congress followers, Rahul Gandhi was shown having 66% vote, Narendra Modi with 15% vote, Mamata Banerjee with 7%, Akhilesh Yadav with 5% and Arvind Kejriwal with 4% votes.
There were some issues with the image that caught our attention. Upon zooming the image, we found that under Mamata Banerjee’s photo, the name appeared to be Hardik Patel. Furthermore, the name under Akhilesh Yadav was Vijay Rupani, and under Arvind Kejriwal’s photo, the name Jignesh Mewani appeared. It was clear that the screenshot was edited by someone to make it appear as if the survey happened recently.
The next step was to find out where the screenshot came from. We reverse-searched the image and found out that the screenshot was taken in the 2017 Gujarat Elections after the results were announced. The screenshot appeared as a featured image of this Times Now report.
The video from which the screenshot was taken was also available on Times Now’s YouTube channel.
Someone from Congress cunningly edited the images and tried to blur the names. However, it appears whoever did the editing part was not well versed with photo editing software, or he/she was in a hurry to publish the tweet. In any case, major blunders were made while editing the image.
Netizens also trolled Congress for the fake survey image.
It was a “Twitter poll” during 2017 Gujarat election, How he edited it to look like a graph for PM race 🤣😂 https://t.co/1ufywZGIGt pic.twitter.com/eBCOqwvcxo
— Lala 🇮🇳 (@FabulasGuy) September 27, 2022
The discussion was about who was being talked about on social media
The Congress “warriors” on social media who shared the edited image tried to assert that there was a survey where Rahul Gandhi was ahead of PM Modi in the popularity votes. But in reality, Times Now was showing the percentage of mentions each leader got on Twitter. Rahul Gandhi got around 90,000+ mentions during the election results. It was found that 66% of the tweets mentioned Rahul Gandhi, and he became the subject of discussion on that day.
Furthermore, around 65% of the tweets that mentioned Rahul Gandhi were positive towards him. Similarly, 54% of the tweets mentioning Narendra Modi talked positively about him.
Now, one crucial thing to understand is that there was no mention of the political choice of those tweeting. Many Congress supporters might have trended Rahul Gandhi on the day Congress faced defeat in the Gujarat elections to show him in a positive light.
Verdict: Official Congress handles and supporters shared a doctored screenshot from a 2017 news report by Times now to claim Rahul Gandhi is favoured more by Indians as compared to PM Modi.
