Hyderabad: A now-deleted Twitter handle that posted a gruesome and perverted tweet, threatening to rape Indian cricket team captain Virat Kohli’s 9-month-old daughter is allegedly based in Hyderabad. The threat came after Kohli came out in support of his team Mohammed Shami.
Investigations by multiple media agencies have indicated that, contrary to claims that the threat was from a Pakistani bot account, the handle was not from Pakistan. According to The Quint’s WebQoof fact-checking team, the account was created in April this year, with the username and handle of the account being changed multiple times.
“We found that the user had interacted with several Indian accounts and had conversations on investing in India and also a tweet in which the user had had a conversation in Telugu,” The Quint’s post on Instagram said.
Fact-checking agency AltNews said it had searched for archived links of tweets from the handle, @criccrazyygirl and found the unique Twitter ID of the account. They found this from Wayback Machine, an internet archive, from where they viewed the source code of the page and the unique ID.
“Twitter’s policy allows a user to change their username, however, the numeric ID or the unique ID remains constant despite a change in the username as it is unique to that account. We then looked for replies to @criccrazyygirl on Twitter and discovered some tweets that redirected to @ramanheist. This means both accounts were the same but the username was changed,” AltNews said.
Apart from tweets on trading on NIFTY, sharing emails by Indian financial services companies, the account had also retweeted tweets in Telugu which also hints it is an Indian account.
The earliest username that the person used to operate under, which Alt News was able to locate, was @pellikuturuhere, a Telugu word. “We found a reply to @pellikututuhere that suggested the person is from Hyderabad,” they said, adding that Wayback Machine also revealed that the person had retweeted tweets by OpIndia and several pro-BJP accounts. They also retweeted anti-Muslim tweets and pro-BJP tweets.
“The person’s Twitter activity does not suggest that they are from Pakistan. The claim that a Pakistani bot account posted an objectionable tweet targeting Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma’s daughter is false. The account is from India,” AltNews said.
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