Two really easy ways to check to see if it’s a fake tweet are:
Check the date. This tweet says it was tweeted in July of 2000. Twitter wasn’t founded until March 2006.
Check to see how many characters are in the tweet. That tweet is over the limit by 25 characters.
The image quality is also pretty bad which is a telltale sign that the tweet probably isn’t real. I’m not saying all screenshotted tweets are fake, I’m saying that there are quite a few of them floating around out there. This is especially true for high visibility accounts. People can be assholes and they love to troll. Keep that in mind the next time you see a truly questionable tweet on your dashboard/timeline.
Screencapped tweets are mindblowingly easy to fake! An actual tweet from my own twitter account [permalink]:
And faked to read something else entirely:
Same time and date stamp, same timeline in the background. This took me all of ten seconds.
If you are going to be screencapping tweets to share information, best practice is to share a permalink to the tweet. Second best is including the time and date stamp. Give people a way to fact check for themselves.
