Old Videos of Crowd Falsely Linked to Waqf Amendment Bill in Mumbai
These videos from Mumbai and Timor-Leste are not related to Waqf Amendment Bill.
advertisement
A set of videos showing a massive crowd gathered on the streets is going viral on social media where users are claiming that it shows Muslims protesting against the Waqf Amendment bill.
(Archives can be seen here and here.)
What's the truth?: These videos from Mumbai and Timor-Leste are not related to Waqf Amendment Bill.
The first video shows people gathered at Mumbai's Marine Drive on 4 July 2024, to welcome the Indian cricket team during their victory parade after winning T20 World Cup 2024.
The second video shows Catholics in East Timor attending a Mass with Pope Francis during his three-day visit to Timor-Leste on 10 September 2024.
How did we find out the truth?: We divided the video into several keyframes and performed a reverse image search using Google lens.
This led us to a YouTube video shared by The Print’s YouTube channel on 4 July 2024.
The description and the title stated that the video shows a massive crowd gathered at Marine Drive to welcome the Indian cricket team during their victory parade.
This parade happened after the Indian team won the T20 World Cup 2024.
We also performed a reverse image search on Google lens on some of the keyframes from the second video.
This led us to a social media post shared on 12 September 2024 that matched the viral clip.
The post caption read, “More than 600,000 people attended the Holy Mass at Taci Tolu, Timor-Leste on 10 September 2024. The group of people following us greets the Holy Father.”
This proves that both the clips predates the recent passing of Waqf Amendment bill and are unrelated to it.
At around the 0:14 timestamp, we noticed several posters of Francis in the background.
Other sources: On searching with keywords like "pope francis east timor" on YouTube, we found a video report by Reuters that showed visuals from Francis' visit to the country.
The video was uploaded on 10 September and it was titled, "Pope Francis draws nearly half of East Timor population to open-air Mass | REUTERS."
When we compared the posters seen in the Facebook video to the ones seen in the video published by Reuters, we found several similarities.
Geolocating the place: Taking the location mentioned above as the hint, we checked the route available on Google Maps.
Using the help of the 'street view' option, we found the exact location where the viral video was filmed.
The same graffiti of Francis can be seen in this view.
The available view is of September of this year and was shared by a user named 'KB'.
We found that both the visuals showed the same posters.
(Source: Facebook/YouTube/Screenshot/Altered by The Quint)
Conclusion: Old and unrelated videos of a massive crowd are being falsely linked to the passing of Waqf Amendment bill.
(Not convinced of a post or information you came across online and want it verified? Send us the details on WhatsApp at 9540511818 , or e-mail it to us at webqoof@thequint.com and we'll fact-check it for you. You can also read all our fact-checked stories here.)