A Twitter user, from the now-deleted Twitter handle ‘Amena @criccrazyygirl’ posted a tweet recently where the user threatened to rape Kohli’s daughter. Indian right-wing Twitterati claimed that @criccrazyygirl is a Pakistani bot account. The allegations turned out to be fake. The Twitter user was indeed and Indian, which was proved by India fact-checking website Alt News.
Alt News first searched for archived links of tweets by @criccrazyygirl to find the unique Twitter ID of the account. “When we found a tweet on Wayback Machine, we viewed the source code of the page and found that its unique Twitter id is ‘1386685474182369290’. 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.”
Some replies to @criccrazyygirl on Twitter were redirected to @ramanheist. This means both accounts were the same but the username was changed.
The same of finding archived tweets of @ramanheist was used on Wayback Machine and was looked for the unique Twitter ID on the source code page.
They also found archived links of tweets where @ramanheist is talking about trading on NIFTY, which is an Indian stock market index. He also shared an e-mail by Zerodha, which is an Indian financial services company. This suggests that the person behind the account hails from India.
Interestingly, from its most recent username @criccrazyygirl, the account had 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, which is a Telugu word. We found a reply to @pellikututuhere that suggested the person is from Hyderabad.
A further rummage of replies to @criccrazyygirl took us to a tweet where a user had replied to the account but @cricccrazyygirl’s tweet is not visible since the account doesn’t exist anymore. They searched for an archived link of the reply on Wayback Machine and found that by the time Wayback Machine had crawled the tweet, the username of @criccrazyygirl had been changed to @StellaisBihp.
Wayback Machine also reveals that the person has retweeted tweets by OpIndia, its CEO Rahul Roushan and pro-BJP accounts. They also retweeted anti-Muslim tweets, tweets on Hindus and pro-BJP tweets. Below is a tweet in Hindi by Ashok Shrivastav that the user retweeted. The tweet is about the Aryan Khan case and a Shiv Sena leader’s petition to the Supreme Court against Khan’s arrest where he urged the top court to protect Khan’s fundamental rights.
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.