Fact check: Bill Gates didn’t write post supporting animal sacrifice

A fake post, purportedly showing Microsoft founder Bill Gates defending the practice of animal sacrifice for Eid, is doing the rounds on social media

The post, in Hindi, claims that the sacrifice of animals for Eid is meant to “feed the poor”, while “millions of animals” are killed every day by fast food giants to cater to the rich.

The same post is also being shared in English.

The Hindu could not find any such post on Mr. Gates’ social media pages. There were no such reports from mainstream media outlets either.

But we found several social media posts attributing the statement to Mr. Gates.

A Twitter user named Enver Baig even shared a screenshot of a tweet on the same topic, seemingly posted by Mr. Gates. The text contained in the screenshot was very similar to the post we were investigating. But again, we could not find any such tweet by Mr. Gates.

A keyword search of the text from the screenshot took us to a tweet posted in 2019 by a user named Kurdistani, which has been retweeted over 41,000 times and garnered over 81,000 likes so far. As it turns out, the same text has been falsely attributed to Mr. Gates.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation confirmed to The Hindu that the post is fake.