A screenshot of an Instagram story of cricketer Virat Kohli praising Congress leader Rahul Gandhi after election results started trickling in from the Karnataka assembly elections indicating a majority for the party is fake.
The counting of votes for the assembly election in Karnataka is currently ongoing, and as of 6.00 pm according to the Election Commission's website the Congress has won 123 seats, the BJP has won 58, and the Janata Dal (Secular) has won 19 seats. Counting for 20 seats is still ongoing with the Congress passing the 113 seats mark needed for a party to form the government.
In the viral screenshot, a story shows Kohli's Instagram account posting a photo of Rahul Gandhi with the caption, "The man, the myth, the leader @rahulgandhi".
A Twitter user tweeted the viral screenshot with the caption, "This is the insta story of virat kohli now he deleted and he also knows how popular bharat jodo yatra is rahul Gandhi the myth the leader and the man #KarnatakaAssemblyElection2023"
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Another screenshot which is also being shared has another photo of Gandhi with the caption reading, "E sala government namde @rahulgandhi". This is a sarcastic spin on the Royal Challengers Bengaluru's (RCB) slogan for the Indian Premier League - "E sala cup namde (this year the cup is ours)".
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FACT-CHECK
BOOM found that the viral screenshot is fake and no such Instagram story was posted by Virat Kohli praising Rahul Gandhi for the Congress's performance in the Karnataka assembly elections.
We did not find any other story posted by Kohli on his official Instagram account or reports which indicated that he shared and deleted such a story. Being a high profile Instagram account with a lot of followers, there would have been multiple screenshots if such a post had been shared by Kohli.
Additionally, the two viral screenshots have different text captions and two different photos of Rahul Gandhi.
We checked the timestamp visible in the viral graphic and found that they do not match the actual fonts on the stories feature of Instagram.
Below we compared the same '17 minutes timestamp' from an Instagram story with the two viral screenshots and showed several discrepancies. There is no gap between '17' and 'm' in the viral screenshots, whereas there is a visible space between the two when a story is posted on Instagram.
We also found that the first viral screenshot was posted by the parody Twitter account Dr Nimo Yadav (@niiravmodi), who regularly shares such fake tweets with sarcastic captions.
Another example can be seen below where the account tweeted a photo of RCB captain Faf du Plessis with a sarcastic caption linking it to the Karnataka elections.
BOOM has previously fact-checked the same Twitter account for tweeting satirical posts that have gone viral with false claims.
