Digitally manipulated clip of ABP debate shared with claims that Iranian lawmakers burnt Indian flag

Visuals of the Indian flag being burnt in the Iranian Parliament are viral on social media and a clip showing a television debate on this image by a Hindi news channel is being widely circulated. Amid the ongoing conflict between Iran and Israel, which began on June 13, India has maintained a cautious diplomatic stance without criticising the move by Israel, prompting some criticism.

X user @haidar5s posted the viral clip, alleging that the Indian flag had been burnt in the Iranian Parliament. When this article was written, the post had managed to accumulate more than 300,000 views and was reshared over 2,500 times. (Archive)

Another user, @summandar01, also posted the video with similar claims. However, this post was later withheld in India. (Archive) 

The viral video was also amplified by several other Pakistani users on X. (Archives 1, 2, 3, 4)

Fact Check

To authenticate the viral image and video. We carefully looked at the visual of the TV debate. The top left corner had the name of the segment: सीधा सवाल (‘Seedha Sawaal’).

Taking cue from this, we ran a relevant keyword search on YouTube and came across the original video uploaded on June 16 by ABP News. The episode of ‘Seedha Sawaal’ features news anchor Sandeep Chaudhary and guest seen on the right in the viral video is retired Major General Bishamber Dayal.

 

We noticed that the viral section begins at the 24:39-minute timestamp. When the show’s host and Dayal converse, the visuals do not show the Indian flag being burnt but generic footage of conflict. Below is an example:

 

The part about the treatment meted out to the Indian flag in the Iranian Parliament seems to have been edited into the viral footage. Nowhere does the TV debate make any such mention or report that something like this happened. The episode remained focused on the conflict between Iran and Israel, as on June 16, and went into discussions about the conflict’s geopolitical consequences for India.

We also ran relevant keyword searches to check if anything of the sort had transpired at the Iranian Parliament, but found no reports. This raised doubts that the visual may have been generated using artificial intelligence.

To be sure, we looked at what the Iranian Parliament looks like based on images used by Iran’s Tasnim news agency. This did not bear a resemblance to the image used in the viral video. Below are comparisons:

On looking closely, we also found several disparities in the viral image. For instance, in the first image, there was no smoke from the fire where one supposed lawmaker is holding the Indian flag on fire; the way his palms hold the flag is also unnatural. The computer placement seemed odd as well. In the second image, we noticed that two chairs placed next to one another and a show plant kept nearby were distorted. The angle at which the flag is shown burning also seemed unnatural. We have highlighted these below:

Based on these findings, we believe the image is likely AI-generated.

To sum up, the viral video of a TV debate showing the Indian flag being burnt in the Iranian Parliament is digitally manipulated. The image of the burning flag was likely generated using AI and added to a clip of an actual ABP debate from June 16 with different audio to mislead viewers.

The post Digitally manipulated clip of ABP debate shared with claims that Iranian lawmakers burnt Indian flag appeared first on Alt News.

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