Did Yanis Varoufakis tweet to Lagarde about repaying dues?

Question

enter image description here There's a screenshot of a Twitter status circulating suggesting that at 1:19 AM - 1 Jul 2015 Yanis Varoufakis tweeted:

@Lagarde sorry for the delay. I am really trying to pay the due but I cannot find an open bank

Supposedly, at the time of the screenshot it was retweeted 1741 times, and favorited 1442 times.

However, the @yanisvaroufakis Twitter feed does not / no longer contain that tweet (I'm looking at the "Tweets" section on linked page). In addition, said account is not a "verified" Twitter account. So I'm skeptical.

Did Yanis Varoufakis actually tweet the above? And, as a bonus question: is that Twitter handle legit?

The Twitter account is legit if you assume that his website (which links to it) is legit which is true if you assume that this UTexas page is legit. — , Jul 01 '15 at 19:37
I'm not sure if @cryptoron's tweet (with 9 RTs) can be considered notable. This simply appears to be an attempt at humour. — , Jul 01 '15 at 19:40
Good points @coleopterist. On the other hand, the feed does have 9k followers (small by most standards, but still quite a few people). In any case, I'd guess you could convert your comments into an answer, or if you don't have time I could self-answer. — Jeroen, Jul 02 '15 at 05:56
The account is legit, but the screenshot could of course be entirely doctored. — gerrit, Jul 02 '15 at 09:41
Twitter has always formatted numbers larger than 999 with a separator, e.g. 2,543 favorites. In this picture, the commas are missing. See a similar twitter answer here. — Online User, Jul 02 '15 at 11:28
@GeorgeChalhoub This is most likely locale based - I see a space instead of comma, someone else might have no separator at all. — Suma, Jul 02 '15 at 11:52

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 02 '15 at 13:03

The Twitter account is legit. It is linked from his website also appears to be legit as it is mentioned in his UTexas bio.

The image is very likely a photo-shopped attempt at humour. If it had been legitimate, then there'd have been more of a brouhaha over it. Varoufakis has around half a million followers. Even so, it'd take some time to ratch up 1741 RTs. This implies that the tweet wasn't immediately taken down. Moreover, unless the CNN logo which is noted in the screenshot belongs to a fake account, it was favourited or re-tweeted by an account with 18M followers. (Only this account appears to use that particular logo.)

Lastly, unlike in this image, trawling through many of Varoufakis' past tweets yields not a single one in which his sentences are not properly capitalised.

You don't even need photoshop to do something like this. There are various easy easy ways to edit a copy of the HTML content from twitter and take a screenshot. For example see http://lifehacker.com/398139/edit-any-web-page-with-a-bookmarklet or https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/dom-and-styles — bdsl, Jul 05 '15 at 12:09

Did Yanis Varoufakis tweet to Lagarde about repaying dues?

1 Answers1