Claim: English cricketer Moeen Ali tweeted that he will not play any match in India and will also boycott the Indian Premier League (IPL) if India does not apologise for recent anti-Islam remarks by BJP leaders.
Fact: The tweet has been wrongly attributed to Ali. The Twitter user responsible for the tweet appears to have been impersonating the cricketer; their account has since been suspended.
Fact or Fiction?
On 7 June 2022, a now-deleted tweet attributed to cricketer Moeen Ali started doing the rounds on social media.
The tweet from the now-suspended account @Moeen_Ali18 states, “If India does not apologize for its blasphemous statement, I will never go to India to play match again, I will also boycott the IPL. And I will appeal to my fellow Muslim brothers to do the same. I Love Muhammad P.B.U.H.”
The tweet came after Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson Nupur Sharma and party leader Naveen Kumar Jindal made remarks that were seen as insulting the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), prompting international backlash.
Soch Fact Check investigated the matter after the tweet was flagged by multiple users on Facebook and Instagram.
Moeen Ali is not active on Twitter. He does not appear to have made any public statement about the recent controversy. Soch Fact Check went through Ali’s profile on the official website of the English Cricket Board but all linked social media accounts were either inactive or unavailable.
A Twitter account with the username @MoeenAli is mentioned on the ECB website, but it has been inactive since 2019.
Virality
Soch Fact Check conducted a CrowdTangle analysis for the 14-day period from June 7 to June 14 using the following search term:
- “I will never to go India to play match again, I will also boycott the IPL.”
The results turned up 90,500 interactions across 480 Facebook posts. The false tweet or content from the tweet can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here on Facebook.
Conclusion: An account impersonating English cricketer Moeen Ali published a tweet demanding an apology from India over recent anti-Islam remarks by BJP leaders. The cricketer is not active on Twitter and has not made any public statements regarding the controversy. The tweets and posts suggesting otherwise are false.