India and Canada have expelled their top diplomats amid escalating tensions over the assassination of a Sikh separatist on Canadian soil. The row intensified over last year’s assasination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canada-based Sikh leader labelled as a terrorist by India. The social media since is abuzz with the posts pertaining to India and Canada. Lighthouse Journalism amidst this found a picture being widely shared on social media platforms that showed BJP members protesting against Canada, outside a Canara bank branch. During the investigation we found that the image is old and edited.
Claim:
X user Veena Jain shared the viral image with a misleading claim.
Other users too are sharing the same image with similar claim.
Investigation:
We started the investigation by running a reverse image search on the viral image.
During the reverse image search we found that the picture was also widely shared last year, in 2023.
We found this image on the website of maalaimalar.com.
The news report was in Tamil. The translation suggested that the BJP members protested against the municipality for removal of the flagpole.
The news was published on 30th August, 2020.
And the picture nowhere showed Canara bank as seen in the recent viral picture.
We used the Image Forensic on the image through InVid tool and detected that the image was digitally altered especially where the board of Canara bank is visible.
The above gifs feature filters from InVid tool’s image forensic that suggest manipulation in an image.
Conclusion: Viral image being shared with claim that BJP members protested against Canada outside of Canara bank is fake. The image being shared is from 2020 and is digitally edited. Viral claim is false.
