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  • 2020-01-10 (xsd:date)
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  • Don’t panic, Nigeria: Trump hasn’t threatened to attack. Two tweets from the US President’s Twitter account were fabricated (en)
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  • Two images shared in multiple posts on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp in Nigeria claim to show tweets from US President Donald Trump warning he will attack the West African country for supporting Iran in the wake of rising tensions between the two sparring nations. However, both images have been digitally altered to look like they were sent from Trump’s personal account and are false. One of the images (screenshot below) has been viewed more than 16,000 times since it was shared here on Facebook on January 8, 2020 by an account displaying the logo of Nigeria’s main opposition People's Democratic Party. (A screenshot taken on January 9, 2020, showing a misleading Facebook post) It claims to show a tweet from Trump posted at 12:11 am on January 8, 2020. The caption, replete with uppercase words and spelling errors typical of Trump’s style, reads: We have reports of NIGERIA supporting Iran ACTIVELY and PASSIVELY....just got of the phone with secretary Pompeo....the USA MUST and WILL respond to terrorist nations IMMEDIATELY! A similar version has been shared here , here , and here on Facebook, and on Twitter here , here , here , and here . Another image purporting to be a Trump tweet also appeared here on Twitter, although the wording is different, but implies the same threat. A snapshot of a tweet purported to be from US President Donald Trump They follow recent international developments which saw Iran launch missiles at two air bases hosting American and other foreign troops in Iraq early on January 8, 2020, a move seen as revenge for the killing of its top military commander Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike near Baghdad Airport on January 3, 2020. Read AFP's report here . Although some members of the pro-Iran Islamic Movement in Nigeria, known as Shi'ites, protested against the killing of Soleimani on January 6 in the capital Abuja, the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs called for calm. The two fabricated images appear designed to achieve the opposite by trading on Trump's robust exchanges on Twitter. AFP searched Trump’s Twitter account on Wayback Machine, a digital archive of internet content that takes regular snapshots of web pages, and found the earliest documented tweet by the US President on January 8 was at 3:15 am (0215 GMT) -- about one hour after one of the purported tweets was supposedly sent. (A screenshot taken on January 9, 2020, showing US President Donald Trump’s archived timeline) The so-called tweets do not appear in Trump’s archived timeline. See here and here . There are also several visual clues that are telling. For starters, it is customary for tweets appearing in someone’s feed to have three symbols in the footer -- comments, retweets, and likes. However, when a tweet is opened, those symbols are replaced by Retweets and Likes and their accompanying numbers (see examples below). (Composite image taken on January 9, 2020, showing differences between tweets) But the image below has an unusual configuration. On one line it shows 244,391 retweets and 319,284 likes, while below that the same metrics are reproduced using the comment, retweet and like symbols, which doesn't happen with Twitter. (A screenshot showing alterations in Trump's fabricated tweet ) The date in the image above is also inconsistent with Twitter's style, which employs the month first, and then the day and year: January 8, 2020. In the second so-called tweet, the number of characters exceeds the limit imposed by Twitter. (A screenshot taken on January 9, 2020, showing Trump's fabricated tweet exceeds Twitter's 280-character limit ) AFP did a count -- the image contains 320 characters, 40 more than the limit of 280 set by Twitter, meaning if it was a genuine tweet, it could not have been published. For good measure, the US Embassy in Nigeria dismissed the images. Press and information officer, Glenn Guimond, when asked by AFP in an email about the veracity of the purported tweets, said: This is false. (en)
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