This video shows a military recruitment event in north India in October 2019

This article is more than one year old.
Published on June 8, 2020 at 03:42
2 min read
By AFP India

Footage of a large crowd has been shared in multiple Facebook posts claiming to show migrant workers who were stopped at the Delhi-Uttar Pradesh state border during India's nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in May 2020. However, the claim is false; the video has circulated online since at least October 2019 and corresponds with local news reports about an Indian Army recruitment drive in Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh.

The one-minute 52-second video has been shared nearly 1,000 times afte it was posted here on Facebook on May 18, 2020.

(Screenshot of the misleading Facebook post)

The Facebook post’s caption reads: “Migrants returning home stopped at Delh-UP border in Ghazipur. They Entered Uttar Pradesh Later by Breaking Barricades. #UttarPradeshModel #UnplannedLockdown”.

Ghazipur is a village in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), which borders the capital city of New Delhi.

The video is also shared alongside a similar claim on Facebook here, here and here.

The claim is false.

A reverse image search on Google using video keyframes extracted with InVID-WeVerify, a digital verification tool, found the same video published on YouTube here on October 15, 2019, months before the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the YouTube caption, the video shows an “Army recruitment drive in Faizabad,” another city in Uttar Pradesh that is more than 650 km southeast of New Delhi.

Below are three sets of screenshot comparison of the video in the misleading posts (L) and the October 2019 YouTube video (R):

Footage shot from different angles and appeared to show a very similar scene in Faizabad in October 2019 can be seen here and here.

A Hindi news website reported here about an army recruitment drive held in Faizabad on October 15, 2019. Other local media reported here and here on the same day that the large turnout created a chaotic scene at the event.

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