A video showing Congress MP Rahul Gandhi speaking at a public event is being shared on social media.
What does he say?: Standing on a stage, Gandhi is heard saying, "I have a big social media presence, I would not rely on that. That thing is a lot of fluff."
Who shared it?: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson Shehzaad Poonawalla shared the clip to claim that Gandhi "accepts his followers and views are not organic or Indian (sic)."
(Archived versions of more posts sharing this claim can be seen here, here, here, and here.)
Is it true?: No, the claim is misleading as it lacks important context.
Speaking at a Colombian university, Gandhi was answering a student's question about 'getting rich' from social media, telling them that it is a temporary to way of making money, referring to it as "fluff."
How do we know?: We ran a search using the keywords, 'Rahul Gandhi social media "fluff"'.
This led us to a Facebook post on the Indian Overseas Congress' official page, which had a video of the event.
Posted on 2 October, the post noted that Gandhi was attending an event called 'Future is Today' at the EIA University, Colombia.
Taking a cue from this, we used the university as well as the event's name to look for the full video on YouTube.
With this, we found that the event was livestreamed on EIA University's channel on 30 October 2025.
We went through the full video to look for the statement in the viral claim.
At the 1:03:25-minute mark in the video, a person in the audience brought up production and consumption, saying that the region, Antioquia, is known for manufacturing but the youth are "very good" at consuming digital content.
"There is a trend that you can get rich in maybe two or three years by being [an] influencer," they said, asking him to give them a message about production and creating jobs when they were focused on consumption.
Gandhi began his response by telling them that he was asked why he had come to Colombia, stressing on the importance of observing other cultures to form connections.
"For the people who are doing the influencer bit, my personal view is that enjoy yourselves, but please, please do not rely on that because that stuff is going to disappear, right?" Gandhi said, calling it a "temporary phenomenon.
He went on to tell the audience to have a "resilient skill" that was useful and reliable, adding that the "more specialised, the more unique," their skill is, the easier it would be for them.
Coming back to social media, he told the audience that they have,
"The tools for massive marketing, massive projection, but you do need that one, or two, or three skills that make you unique. I mean, I have a big social media presence, I would not rely on that thing. That thing is a lot of fluff. Be careful."Rahul Gandhi speaking at EIA University, Colombia
A video of the event was also shared on The Hindu's YouTube channel.
Conclusion: A video of Rahul Gandhi calling social media following "fluff" is being shared without important context.
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