Fact Check: The man who played the dual role of Naseeruddin Shah and Rakesh Tikait on Twitter

Naseeruddin Shah’s position on the ongoing peasant agitation is well known. In a recent interview, the Sparsh actor even questioned the silence of Bollywood bigwigs over the protests.

Little did he know, however, that his role in the peasant movement would be reinforced by some Twitter user who would create a fake profile in his name and post repeated tweets on the issue. Worse, thousands of other users will believe the words come out of his mouth.

The Twitter handle “@naseruddin_shah” had nearly 60,000 followers before it was first deleted on the evening of January 9, and then put up again; this time with a bio called “parody”. The archived version of the previous handle can be seen here.

One account, three avatars

By the way, this handle was formerly an imitation of the peasant leader, Rakesh Tikait, and tweeting posts of pro-peasants and anti-government. How do we know that? Well, every Twitter account has a unique ID that cannot be changed even if the name of the handle is changed.

Using the TweetBeaver tool, we found that the Twitter ID of the account ‘@naseruddin_shah’ is 1156454382675869696. When we searched for this ID in the Yandex search engine, we found that the same Twitter account was previously active with the handles ‘@RakeshTkaite’ and ‘@ TurkBilal007’.

When we searched for tweets sent to the Twitter tutorial “@RakeshTkaite”, we found several of them in which people addressed the person as “Tikait ji”.

Similarly, we got a tweet in which we sent the tweets to “@ TurkBilal007”, which mentions the handle. In addition, we found absurd tweets like “Will no one follow me back?” It is clear that Naseeruddin Shah will never beg for retweets in this way.

Who is the impersonator?

Using the “Social Bearing” tool, we looked at hashtags most commonly used by this account. We found that this person, along with tweets about the farmers’ protest, repeatedly used the hashtag “Amroha”. We further found that this Twitter handle has also been active in the past with the username “Bilal Mughal Amrohi”.

There is therefore a possibility that the person using this handle could be connected to Amroha in Uttar Pradesh.

We also found a Facebook page called “Bilal Ahmed Amrohi”. The username of this page is “@indianmuslimektapage”. Here we found several screenshots from the removed Twitter grab “@ TurkBilal007”. This indicates that both of these accounts can be interconnected and possibly managed by the same person.

In addition, this page mentions a website “http://bilalahmedamrohi.com/” that was not functional at the time of submitting this story. However, the name of the website also indicates that this website and the Facebook page with the username ‘@indianmuslimektapage’ belong to the same person who imitated Rakesh Tikait and Naseeruddin Shah on Twitter.

In the cached version of the removed Twitter handle “@ TurkBilal007“, we found the photo of the person who most likely created the fake handles. Ironically, the caption says,” I’m not perfect, but at least I’m not fake.

Recently, Naseeruddin’s wife, Ratna Pathak Shah, told the media that he did not have a Twitter account. She said the bill created in July 2019 and posted in favor of farmers’ protests while posing as Shah did not belong to the Iqbal actor.

Since the Twitter handle “@naseruddin_shah” was also created in July 2019 and is being posted in favor of farmers’ protests, it is very likely that she was talking about this particular handle. However, Naseeruddin has a verified Facebook page with the username “NaseeruddinOfficial”.