Nepal protest footage misrepresented as anti-corruption rally in the Philippines
- Published on November 27, 2025 at 04:54
- 2 min read
- By Lucille SODIPE, AFP Philippines
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Public anger over a spiralling flood control scandal involving Philippine officials and lawmakers was reflected in the huge crowds that attended an anti-corruption rally in Manila in mid-November, but a video that social media posts claimed showed the protest was in fact filmed in Nepal months earlier. The user who originally posted the video told AFP it was filmed near his office in Kathmandu during a deadly uprising that toppled the country's government in September.
"Here are millions, November 16, 2025," reads overlaid Tagalog-language text on a Facebook reel shared on the same day and viewed more than 779,000 times.
The video shows a top-down view of a crowd-filled street.
It circulated on the first day of back-to-back anti-corruption rallies in Manila called by the Iglesia ni Cristo, a religious group that has historically been a powerful voting bloc in the Philippines, with police estimating a crowd in the hundreds of thousands (archived link).
The protest called for accountability over a spiralling flood control scandal, with scores of construction firm owners, government officials and parliament members -- including President Ferdinand Marcos's congressman cousin -- accused of pocketing funds for substandard or so-called ghost infrastructure projects.
A day after the demonstrations, Philippine prosecutors filed the first criminal charges in the case, promising "many" more indictments (archived link).
The same video was also shared in similar Facebook and Instagram posts.
But it does not show the mid-November protest in Manila.
A combination of reverse image and keyword searches led to the same footage shared on TikTok on September 8 (archived link).
The video was shared on an account that also posted similar clips of protests in the same area, with one post containing the hashtag "New Baneshwor" -- an area in Kathmandu containing Nepal's parliament and other government offices (archived link).
At least 76 people were killed during demonstrations in Nepal on September 8 and 9 that were triggered by a brief government ban on social media and led by protesters under the loose "Gen Z" umbrella title (archived link).
Anger during the September rallies ran much deeper after years of economic stagnation and entrenched corruption that primed the country of 30 million people for upheaval. Parliament, courts and government offices were torched, before four-time premier KP Sharma Oli was ousted.
The user who posted the TikTok video, Mahesh Kumar Shrestha, said he filmed the video.
"The video posted in my TikTok is [in] Kathmandu, Nepal -- protest against government by GenZ," he told AFP on November 22, adding that he filmed the protest from his office on Madan Bhandari Road in Kathmandu.
The footage corresponds to Google Street View imagery near Shrestha's office (archived link).
The false claim was also debunked by Philippine fact-checking organisation FactRakers (archived link).
AFP previously debunked a similar false claim that misrepresented Nepal protest footage as an anti-corruption rally in Manila.
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