The mainstream media often comes up with wildly incorrect conjectures when they are hard-pressed for breaking news. One ‘news’ that was peddled today by the media was the Jyotiraditya Scindia, the former Congress leader who is now with the BJP, had removed his association with the BJP from his Twitter bio.
Several mainstream media channels furthered this news. TimesNow and Financial Express carried the news prominently. The article was laden with conjectures about the speculation of an internal rift in BJP.
One news portal called News Track even went so far as to say that Jyotiraditya Scindia might be re-joining Congress.
However, what is being reported is patently untrue. It almost appears as though the media simply woke up today morning and decided to randomly check the Twitter profile of Jyotiraditya Scindia and having not found the word ‘BJP’, creating a story based on it out of thin air.
The fact is that even after joining BJP, Jyotiraditya Scindia never had the word ‘BJP’ in his Twitter bio.
A quick look at the web archive of his Twitter bio would make this fact amply clear. OpIndia went back to archived versions of his bio up until the time he joined BJP and found that the word ‘BJP’ was never mentioned in his bio, to begin with.
Here is a screenshot from the archive of Scindia’s Twitter profile from the 17th of May. As one can see, BJP is not mentioned in his Twitter bio.
On the 9th May too, Scindia did not have BJP in his bio.
It is pertinent to note that Jyotiraditya Scindia joined BJP on the 12th of March.
The only difference when one looks at the profile change from 7th March to 22nd March (of which Archive versions are available), one notices that Scindia had changed his display picture. While he was in Congress, his scarf was that of Congress and once he joined BJP, his scarf changed accordingly. Even right after joining BJP, his association was not mentioned in his Twitter bio.
It is thus safe to conclude that Jyotiraditya Scindia, in fact, did not remove BJP from his Twitter bio since BJP was never mentioned in Twitter bio, to begin with.
This is not the first time that Jyotiraditya Scindia’s Twitter bio has created a storm in a tea-cup. Back in November 2019, similar speculation had taken wind about Scindia removing Congress from his Twitter bio. However, an analysis of the Archives revealed that he had changed his bio a month before the speculations started.
