F1 Fanatic

Alonso has some emotional issues he should deal with over the winter.
Less politics, more driving!

Looks like a photoshop to me. Reading this on a laptop, I tilted by screen back, and noticed a fuzzy grey pixelated border around the main text of the tweet – most noticeable on the blank space two lines below the word “justicia” . This unusual feature is absent in the genuine tweets I’ve seen, like the ones in the daily round-up. I’m no expert, but having used and seen the results of image editing software before, especially when the images are reproduced in low quality, I would theorize that someone copied and pasted the inflammatory comment onto a Twitter post template with Alonso’s user information.

(Of course, the other possibility is that the tweet is genuine, and the visual artifacts are the result of low image resolution, in which case my hypothesis would be incorrect.)

The above notwithstanding, Alonso should be, and in all likelihood is, intimately familiar with the niceties of F1 politics. I don’t believe he could have been so brash as to post such a thing.

I did a Twitter search using the hashtag, looking for manual retweets of this tweet (i.e. retweets sent as new tweets starting with RT). The presence of those would at least show the feasibility of such a tweet ever existing. I couldn’t find any, so I’m pretty sure this is fake.

This seals it for me – @leandra-graves reckons it’s fake:

@f1fanatic_co_uk @alo_oficial I receive mobile phone notifications for Alonso’s tweets and never had such a message come through #fake

— Leandra Graves (@leandra23xx) November 30, 2012

Yeah – I don’t see much foul in it. I’ve seen a lot of tweets where the press manager in charge of social media just forgets to switch accounts, and sends his personal tweets through a company account.

I can just imagine the sudden realisation and panic that must’ve went through whoever sent that. They weren’t the first and they won’t be the last to do that.