FAKE: A viral screenshot of an insulting Twitter post by Dr Mahamudu Bawumia is fabricated

Claim: Dr Bawumia posts insulting response to a Tweet

Source: Viral image

Verdict: FAKE

Researched by Gifty Tracy Aminu  

A screenshot of a tweet allegedly coming from the verified Twitter/X account of Ghana’s Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, in which he abuses another Twitter/X user is being circulated online (here, here and here).

The screenshot shows the Twitter handle of the Vice President, now the flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), responding to a question from an X user (@citizen_1) and the date the alleged post was made – September 1, 2023.

This fact-check report seeks to verify the claim attributed to the Vice President.

Fact-check

To fact-check the claim, GhanaFact will verify the authenticity of the accounts that can be seen in the viral screenshot including – @citizen_1, @MBawumia and @Frimisokor.

Checks by GhanaFact showed some inconsistencies in the activities of the X accounts as compared to the message on the viral image.

First, GhanaFact found an unverified X account @citizen_1, created in 2009 with 3 followers and last made a post on Jul 22, 2011. This means the same account could not have tweeted the question: “We’re still waiting for you to answer the 170 questions” on September 1, 2023.

Subsequent checks to find the X account @Frimisokor, which according to the viral screenshot replied to the supposed tweet by Dr Mahamudu Bawumia showed the account does not exist.

GhanaFact conducted an advance Twitter search on the verified Twitter/X account of Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia and found no such tweet or reply as captured on the viral image on his page as of September 1, 2023.

Using fotoforensics – a digital image forensics tool – in assessing the viral image, GhanaFact found the image was likely fabricated.

The Error Level Analysis (ELA) shows the amount of difference that occurs during a JPEG/image resave. More white means more change, and black indicates no change.

In the viral image, the background is completely black, but the text is not. That means that the background is at a different quality level compared to the rest of the picture; so there was some digital modification.

With ELA, all edges should be at about the same error level. Similar surfaces should all have similar error levels, similar colouring should have similar error levels, similar patterns, etc. But that isn’t the case here.

Meanwhile, there are existing tools that allow you to create a fake tweet with a verified tag – Fake Tweet Generator (TWEETGEN) being one of them.

Verdict

The viral screenshot and claim attributed to the Vice President of Ghana is FAKE