A video showing a child influencer enacting a gender reveal ceremony is circulating with false communal claims that a nine-year-old girl from a Muslim country was pregnant.
The video shows a young girl holding her artificially created baby bump as she looks at a gender reveal smoke that slowly turns pink hinting that she is going to have a baby girl.
BOOM found that the girl in the video is a child influencer and artist named Nahal. She was enacting a gender reveal ceremony. The video was originally posted on the girl's account on July 20, 2024.
The video was shared on X with the caption, "This girl is only 9 years old and she is already pregnant. Her only ‘fault’ was that she was born in a Muslim Country."
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The video is also viral on Facebook with the same caption.
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Fact Check
We first ran a reverse image search on a keyframe from the video and were led to an X post featuring a screenshot of the viral video. It was taken from the Instagram account @nahalabbarin. According to the post the child artist mimicked her mother in the video.
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The viral video was originally uploaded on Instagram by the handle @nahalabbarin on July 20, 2024. The Persian caption translates to, "Did you see what colour our world became #surprise #girl #genderreveal."
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A pinned comment by the page @nahal.fan.page stated, "Please don't judge in a rush. This is just a funny clip from a series. Newcomers are invited to watch previous episodes."
We found another video posted by Nahal on the same day where she appears in multiple outfits including the one she wears in the viral video. The caption reads, "Baby gender reveal on the next post.#genderreveal." (Translated from Persian) This showed that Nahal played several characters in the staged gender revealed ceremony.
We then reached out to Farhad Souzanchi from Factnameh, an Iran-based fact-checking organisation, who clarified, "Nahal was imitating the gender reveal ceremonies that are commonly held in Western countries where family members guess the gender of the baby. In this particular video, with every outfit change, she plays the role of a different relative. At the beginning of the video, the girl says, "Let’s see what the family members think about the gender of our baby" then in each cut she is seen acting as one of them."
In one of the videos posted on July 25, 2024, Nahal explains that she has created two imaginary characters Samira and Soheila, who are married. In the video, she was acting as one of the characters named Soheila who, according to her, was pregnant.
Nahal's Instagram page regularly uploads different acting videos. In her Instagram bio, she refers to herself as an "artist" and that she is "In love with acting." The account description further mentions that the page operates under her parent's supervision. BOOM has reached out to the account for a comment. The article will be updated as and when we get a response.