Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) President Mayawati held a huge rally on Thursday to mark the death anniversary of BSP founder Kashi Ram in Lucknow.
Lighthouse Journalism found a video being widely shared on social media platforms. It was claimed that the massive crowd seen in the video depicted a recent rally of Mayawati.
During the investigation, we found that the video is unrelated and from Argentina. It is not recent from the BSP’s rally in Lucknow.
Claim:
Instagram user Arun Choudhary shared the video on their profile.
Other users are also sharing the same video with similar claims.
Investigation:
We started the investigation by running a reverse image search on the keyframes obtained from the video.
We found the video on a post on Instagram.
The post stated: Messi forced to evacuate via Helicopter as over 4million people swarm the Argentina national team…
We also found a YouTube short posted on December 20, 2022.
The description said: 4 MILLION people in the streets of Argentina
We also found the video posted on Facebook.
One screenshot showed one building with the board, ‘HOSTEL SOL’. We ran reverse image search on that particular keyframe and found the exactly similar board of HOSTEL SOL.
We found details about this hotel on a website.
We found that the building is located in Buenos Aires (Argentina).
We also found the location of the building. The street view looked very similar to the one shown in the video.
Though this video was not from the recent rally of Mayawati, there was a huge crowd at the rally.
The video on ANI’s YouTube channel shows the crowd at the rally.
Conclusion: An unrelated video from Argentina was shared as recent footage from BSP’s recent rally. The viral claim is misleading.
