Lighthouse Journalism in the backdrop of the recent G7 meeting in Italy came across a video being widely shared on social media platforms. The video and the claim suggested that it shows grand welcome for Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Italy during his recent visit to G7 meet. However, during the investigation we found that the video is old from Sydney and is not recent.
Claim:
X user @Trishool_Achuk shared the video on his profile.
Check the archive version of the post.
Other users too are sharing the video with the same claim.
Investigation:
We started our investigation by uploading the video in the InVid tool and obtaining several keyframes from the same to run a Google reverse image search on these keyframes.
Several posts before the G7 summit suggested that the video was not from the G7 summit but must have been taken before.
We also observed an Australian flag flashing in the background and on the screen in the video. In the video we also notice PM Narendra Modi being greeted by his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese.
We then ran a Google search on the keywords noticed in the video.
Through this we found a report in The Guardian. The article was a year old.
The report mentioned: Thousands of members of Australia’s Indian community have given a rapturous stadium welcome to Anthony Albanese and Narendra Modi as a new centre for Australia-India relations was announced for Sydney’s west.
The visuals in the report looked similar to the viral visuals.
We also found similar news reports.
The reports and the captions suggested: India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke during an event with members of the local Indian community at the Qudos Arena in Sydney on May 23, 2023.
We also found a video posted on the YouTube channel of Anthony Albanese MP. The video was uploaded a year ago.
We also found the video uploaded on the YouTube channel of PM Narendra Modi.
We also found the visuals corresponding with the viral video on a video uploaded on the YouTube channel of ANI.
On comparing both the videos with the viral video, it confirmed that the visuals are from Sydney and not Italy.
Conclusion: A year-old video of Sydney, Australia goes viral with claims of it being recent from PM Narendra Modi’s recent visit to Italy. Viral claims are misleading.
