Lighthouse Journalism came across a video, it was claimed along with the video that it was Minister of Finance Nirmala Sitharaman herself who was talking about keeping GST a secret. In the video the minister clearly looked young, and the expressions looked a bit off. During the investigation we found that the video was altered and Nirmala Sithraman’s face was superimposed on another video.
Claim:
In the video the lady was seen saying that GST is a secret tax and the data cannot be released this time because of the hike in Jio rates.
X user Chirag Patel shared the video on his profile.
Check the archive version of the post here.
Other users too are sharing the video.
Investigation:
We uploaded the video in the InVid tool and ran reverse image search on the keyframes obtained from it. This led us to the original video.
The video was titled: Nirdaya Raman Raghav shows neither account nor accountability
The video was made by a content creator, Garima. She has mentioned in the description that this is a satire and a parody entertainment channel, which may not use actual names often in quasi-real and/or fictitious narration. All videos contained within the channel are works of fiction.
We also ran this video through the Deepfake detector by InVid tool. We found that the detector showed a 6% probability that the person’s face was replaced in the video.
Conclusion: Nirmala Sitharaman did not give a statement on GST, viral video is altered. Viral claim is false.
