A video of a man seemingly expressing anguish and writhing on a bed is being shared as the last video of late actor Sushant Singh Rajput, claiming that it shows that he was in depression.
However, it is actually a TikTok video uploaded in April and has nothing to do with the late actor at all.
CLAIM
The short clip, in which the man’s face cannot be seen, shows him letting out loud sounds of frustration or anguish as he flops about on the bed.
We found a huge number of people also sharing the same video on TikTok, lamenting the passing of Singh Rajput.
A trend could be seen on TikTok where people watched the clip of the man and reacted to it and added photos of Singh Rajput or captions related to him.
WHAT WE FOUND
On looking at the text in black and white superimposed on the video, it seemed evident that this was not a real video or CCTV footage but a TikTok video made for the purpose of entertainment.
A reverse search of the keyframes of the video took us to the original TikTok video, which had been uploaded to the video sharing platform on 9 April, 2020 by a user called ‘benesqueda’.
On going through the user’s profile, we saw that he had uploaded many such videos which had him enacting a scenario, which would be written in text superimposed on the video itself.
Therefore, it is clear that an old TikTok video unrelated to Sushant Singh Rajput’s passing is being used to claim that it is the last video of the late actor before he died by suicide on Sunday, 14 June. According to primary information, he had been suffering from depression.
The Quint has previously reported on TikTok’s misinformation problem, how it has been inundated with disinformation around COVID-19 and also about organisations and individuals who are trying to curb the flow of misinformation on the platform.
(If you feel suicidal or know someone in distress, please reach out to them with kindness and call these numbers of local emergency services, helplines, and mental health NGOs.)
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