On 1 June 2023, the Madhya Pradesh Youth Congress resorted to a fake image to claim that an opinion poll has predicted that Congress will win the next assembly election in Madhya Pradesh. They doctored images from visuals of ABP News to make the claim, but was immediately caught by netizens.
The MP Youth Congress on Twitter posted ‘screenshots’ from a ABP News broadcast of an opinion poll, which says in Hindi that according to the survey, Kamal Nath can return to power with a heavy majority. Another screenshot posted by them says that 87% of people have selected Congress leader Kamal Nath as their first choice for the post of CM of Madhya Pradesh. It says that Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Jyotiraditya Scindia have been selected by 10% and 3% of people.
However, the screenshots are filled with errors, making it obvious that they are doctored and not real. In the snapshot saying that Kamal Nath can return to power with a heavy majority, the Hindi word bhari has been misspelt. Moreover, ABP News used a 3D format for the visuals, where the text is tapered towards the centre of the screen, to create an illusion of two walls of digital graphics.
But the text in the image posted by MP Youth Congress is straight, and it does not match the style of the rest of the screen.
Netizens also dug out the original image used by the MP Youth Congress to create the image. It was taken from the broadcast of ABP News Lokniti CSDS Survey on Gujarat done in 2017, ahead of the assembly elections in the state. The visual that the Congress used actually says that BJP can return to power in Gujarat with a heavy majority.
The visual can be seen after 18 minutes in the video uploaded on the YouTube channel of ABP News.
From the attire and body language of the anchor seen on the screen, it can be ascertained that MP Youth Congress used a snapshot of the same program to create the fake image.
The other image saying 87% people have named Kamal Nath as their first choice as CM is also fake, as there is no ABP News Survey with this result. The most recent survey on the CM’s choice in Madhya doe by ABP News was in 2018, ahead of the assembly elections later that year.
In that survey, Shivraj Singh Chouhan was picked by 37% of respondents and Jyotiraditya Scindia was selected by 24% of respondents. On the other hand, only 10% of people had named Kamal Nath as their choice in the survey done by ABP News-Lokniti CSDS.
Madhya Pradesh assembly elections as scheduled for January next year, and there is no record of any survey done by ABP News for the upcoming polls.
MP Youth Congress later deleted the tweet with the fake survey.
