MS Dhoni’s old photo Falsely shared as his support for Congress party

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A photo (here, here and here) of MS Dhoni has gone viral, asserting that he supports and has voted for the Congress party. In this viral photograph, Dhoni is seen showing six fingers, which supposedly signifies his support for the Indian National Congress (INC). We fact-check this claim through this article.

An archived version of this can be found here.

Claim: MS Dhoni has voted for the Congress party, and encourages everyone to vote for the INDI Alliance

Fact: The viral photo of MS Dhoni dates back to 2020 when Dhoni celebrated the Chennai Super Kings ‘X’ handle reaching six million followers on a social media platform. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.

To verify the claim, we initiated a reverse image search, which directed us to the verified social media handle of Chennai Super Kings (CSK). The same photo was shared (archive) by CSK in October 2020 to celebrate their achievement of six million followers on the platform.

In addition to this, we found that several news publications (here, here and here) published the same photograph during that time, each of them reiterating that the photo was shared by CSK celebrating their follower milestone.

Further, we searched MS Dhoni’s official social media channels and found no statements of him endorsing the Congress party in the upcoming 2024 elections.

To sum up, an old and unrelated photo of MS Dhoni is being falsely shared as him supporting the Congress party.