PML-N did not share manipulated image of Mansehra rally showing inflated crowd size

The iVerify Pakistan team has checked this content and has established that it is false since the image of a crowd from the PML-N’s Mansehra rally on January 22, 2024, was shared by a fan account of a journalist, and it was manipulated.

To arrive at this verdict, the iVerify Pakistan team has sourced back to the original picture shared by the political party from its Jan 22 rally and ran it through a fake image-detecting tool.

HOW IT STARTED

On Jan 22, an image of a political rally was shared by a user describing themselves as a “fan account” of journalist Haroon Rasheed on social media platform X.

The post did not mention the political party whose rally the image was from and neither did it mention the time, date, location, context or setting of the image.

However, the flags seen in the image, the symbol of a tiger on the flags and a stuffed toy of a white tiger all pointed it to being a PML-N rally.

The attached image was circled at three points to show a man wearing a purple shirt, with his arms crossed behind his head.

The caption for the post said: “Despite biryani in the rally,” implying that the image needed to be manipulated to show a larger crowd size than was actually present.

The post gained over 150,000 views.

Similarly, the same image along with the caption was posted by the wife of journalist Imran Riaz in an X post with the caption “I think everyone should do it, but do it without getting caught.”

The post was viewed over 20,000 times.

In another X post, PTI spokesperson on economic affairs Muzzammil Aslam posted the same image with the caption “Three look-alikes in one gathering.”

This post gained over 16,000 views.

METHODOLOGY

Seeking to determine the veracity of the image, the iVerify Pakistan team initially checked the official social media accounts of PML-N and found the original photo from the Jan 22 rally in Mansehra.

The iVerify Pakistan team then compared both images, i.e., the one shared on the official PML-N Punjab media account and the one shared by the X user.

The purpose of the comparison was to see if the circulated image was manipulated by placing the purple-shirt man in three different places in the photo.

In the photo shared by the X user, it can be seen that the man in the purple shirt was standing at three different places. However, the same man was only traced in the middle of the crowd in the image shared by the PML-N.

Moreover, the purple-shirt man was not detected in the corners of the PML-N’s image.

Next, the iVerify Pakistan team then ran both images on the image manipulation detection tool Fotoforensics to see which one was tampered with.

As per the results, the image shared by the PML-n account (left) has very low noise. However, the image shared by the X user (right) has a lot of noise, showing that tampering and manipulation were done with the image.

Circling back, the team also checked if the image was posted by Rasheed’s official X account. 

It was found that the tampered picture was not shared by the official X account of the journalist as the X handle for the fan account is spelt haroonn_natamam, while Rasheed’s official X handle is spelt haroon_natamam.

The fan account has an extra ‘n’ in its spelling of Haroon.

PML-N POWERSHOW IN MANSEHRA

According to a Dawn report, PML-N supremo Nawaz Sharif urged the people of Mansehra in the Jan 22 rally to vote for his party so that he could overhaul the economy and put the country back on the path to development.

Election campaigning by political parties is fully under way in the run-up to the general polls on February 8.

CONCLUSION

The iVerify Pakistan team has determined that the claim about the viral image from the PML-N rally is false, as the original photo does not show the same purple-shirt man standing at three different places in the crowd.

Moreover, the tampered image was shared by a fan account of the Pakistani journalist.