Clip of Paramahansa Yogananda Falsely Shared as Rare Video of Swami Vivekananda
The video shows Paramahansa Yogananda in New York, not Swami Vivekananda as claimed/
The video shows Paramahansa Yogananda in New York and not Swami Vivekananda.
(Source: WhatsApp/Altered by The Quint)
A black-and-white video of a man dressed in a turban and a road walking with a group of people is being shared on social media platforms.
The claim: The video is being shared to claim that it shows a rare video of Indian monk Swami Vivekananda in Chicago, USA taken in 1893.
An archive of this post can be seen here.
How did we find out?: We noticed a watermark which reads 'mirc@sc.edu' in the viral video.
The video had a watermark.
Taking a cue from this, we ran a keyword search using the same words.
This led us to the webpage mentioning the Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC) on the University of Southern California's website.
The page showed an option to browse MIRC's digital library, where we used 'Swami' as a keyword to look for the viral video.
With this keyword search, we came across a page titled 'Swami Yogananda of India--outtakes' which carried a longer version of the video.
It mentioned that the video showed Swami Yogananda at New York's Pershing Square and that it was possibly shot in 1923.
The video mentioned that it showed Swami Yogananda.
The part of this video which has been used in the viral claim starts at the 34-second mark.
We then compared a screenshot from the viral video to a photo of Swami Vivekananda.
We compared photos of Paramahansa Yogananda and Swami Vivekananda.
Conclusion: A video of Paramahansa Yogananda is being shared with the false claim that it shows a rare video of Swami Vivekananda.
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