Lighthouse Journalism found a video being widely shared on social media platforms including WhatsApp. The video showed a huge crowd on the streets. It was claimed along with the video that the video showed traffic on the Nashik highway up to Mulund Check Naka in Mumbai. The video was claimed to be an AIMIM rally. During the investigation we found the claim to be misleading. The video is from Timor-Leste and not Mumbai.
Claim:
X user Ravichandran shared the viral video on his profile with misleading claim.
Other users too are sharing the same video.
The video was also shared on WhatsApp groups.
Investigation:
We started the investigation by downloading the video and uploading it in the InVid tool. We obtained the keyframes from the video and ran a reverse image search on the screenshots obtained.
We found a video uploaded on Facebook page titled: TĂn thĂĄc – lĂČng ChĂșa thÆ°ÆĄng xĂłt
The caption stated: More than 600,000 people attended the Mass presided over by Pope Francis in Taci Tolu, Timor-Leste on the afternoon of September 10, 2024.
A line of people waved to the Pope
We found a longer version of the video on YouTube channel titled, SAP News TL.
The video was uploaded here four days ago and the visuals were very similar to the video being shared as that of AIMIM rally.
We also found the video on another Facebook page.
We found a report about his visit to Timor-Leste on vaticannews.com.
There were several reports about his visit in the month of September.
Conclusion: Video of crowd gathered in Timor-Leste for Pope’s visit is being falsely shared as that of recent AIMIM rally in Mumbai. Viral claim is misleading.
