Fact Check: Twitter did not suspend Elon Musk’s account, false claim goes viral

New Delhi (Vishvas News): Some social media users have been sharing screenshots purporting to show that Elon Musk account had been suspended. Users are claiming that Twitter did this because Elon Musk cancelled the deal with Twitter.

Vishvas News in its investigation found that this claim is completely baseless. Elon Musk is constantly active on Twitter. A screenshot of a fake Twitter account is being shared on social media with the wrong claim.

Claim :

Twitter user Daniel Marwen posted a screenshot on his handle on July 10. Caption reads, ‘So twitter suspended Elon Musk account cause his not buying them anymore.’

The archived version of this post can be viewed here.

Investigation :

We started scanning Elon Musk’s verified Twitter account on Twitter to know the truth of the viral claim. We found that Elon Musk’s account has not been suspended and he is constantly active on Twitter. We also searched Elon Musk’s account using the web archive tool, but even here we got the same information that he is constantly active on Twitter.

Scanning revealed that he has given information about his starship launch in a tweet today at 11:08 am (July 13, 2022). This was his last tweet till fact checked. 101 million people follow Elon Musk on Twitter. Elon Musk has been active on Twitter since 2009.

Taking the investigation further, we started searching on Google through several keywords. We did not receive any credible media reports corroborating the viral claim. It is a matter of thought that Elon Musk is a famous personality. If Twitter had suspended his account after the cancellation of the deal, then there must have been some media report related to it.

We started searching about the username on the screenshot to know the full truth. During this we found that this is another account, which was being run in the name of Elon Musk. Which has been suspended by Twitter and people are sharing it as Elon Musk. Actually, the name of Elon Musk’s Twitter handle is @elonmusk, while the name of the suspended Elon Musk is @eionmusk.

For more details, we got in touch with social media expert Manish Pandey. They told us that the viral claim is false. The viral screenshot is of a fake account. The user made a slight change in the spelling to confuse people and created a fake account, so that people would think that this is the real account of Elon Musk and now people are sharing the fake and suspended account as the truth. By making a slight change in the spelling in the URL, people often run such fake accounts, which many people consider to be true.

At the end of the investigation, Vishvas News did a social scanning of Twitter user Daniel Marwen, who shared the fake post. From scanning, we came to know that the user is a resident of South Africa. Daniel Marwen is followed by 830.4K people.