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On November 7, a digital media outlet shared a post claiming that Federal Minister Ahsan Iqbal had deleted his old posts on X criticising US President-elect Donald Trump. However, these posts were not deleted and can still be found on Iqbal’s X timeline.
Trump, the Republican Party candidate, won the US presidential elections with 295 electoral votes and is now set to become the 47th president of the country. He contested against the Democratic Party, led by current Vice President Kamala Harris.
On November 7, a digital media outlet Dekhlo reported that Federal Minister for Planning, Development, and Special Initiatives Ahsan Iqbal “allegedly” deleted old tweets against Trump, following his victory in the US elections, 2024.
The headline on the news poster read, “PML-N Minister Allegedly Deletes Old Tweets Against Trump Following His Victory in the US Elections 2024”.
The news poster featured Iqbal and Trump with three of the former’s posts in the background which criticised Trump and drew a comparison of his followers with former prime minister Imran Khan’s followers.
The caption of the post read: “Following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US elections, Pakistani Minister and senior PML-N leader Ahsan Iqbal allegedly deleted old tweets criticising Trump, in which he had previously compared Trump to Pakistani leader Imran Khan”.
The news poster by Dekhlo was widely circulated on X too, with Abuzar Salman Niazi, Member Core Committee, PTI, sharing it on his account.
The X version received 56,000 views and was reshared 765 times.
Secretary Information, PTI, Sheikh Waqas Akram also shared the Dekhlo news poster on his X feed.
His post received 231,000 views and was reshared 9,400 times.
Leading news outlet ARY News also reported on the alleged matter of Ahsan Iqbal deleting his posts about Trump on X.
The ARY News poster was viewed 16,000 times and reshared 572 times.
A digital news outlet True Pakistan, on Instagram, also shared the news, saying, “PML-N minister Allegedly Deletes Tweets Against Trump Following His Victory in the US Elections 2024”.
A fact-check was initiated to determine the veracity of the claim due to its virality and the nature of the claim as it involved a federal minister criticising the new US president-elect of the US in the past.
To investigate the claim, a keyword search was conducted on Google, mentioning the caption which can be seen in the news poster.
One of the X posts read, “Can you guess Pakistani Donald Trump?”.
Writing the caption on Google, and adding the words “Ahsan Iqbal” and “X” with it, yielded links to Iqbal’s original post on X, on October 26, 2016.
The same procedure was followed with the other two X posts which resulted in original links to Iqbal’s X posts on October 21, 2016 and November 10, 2020 respectively.
The claim regarding Federal Minister Ahsan Iqbal deleting his old X posts criticising Trump turned out to be false.
The old X posts can still be found on his account.
This fact check was originally published by iVerify Pakistan — a project of CEJ and UNDP.
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