The official accounts of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath posted a morphed photo showing him wave at supporters and said it was from his election campaign rally at Etawah that took place on February 15, 2022.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader posted the photo with a Hindi caption which translates to, "District Etawah is going to create history.. The 'leaders of terrorists' and 'protectors of criminals' will be battered here. Etawah has decided, lotus flower is going to blossom at every booth.. Thanks Etawah!"
(Original Text in Hindi: जनपद इटावा, इतिहास रचने जा रहा है... 'आतंकियों के रहनुमा' और अपराधियों के सरपरस्त' यहां पस्त होंगे। इटावा ने ठाना है, हर बूथ पर कमल का फूल खिलाना है... धन्यवाद इटावा!)
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Fact Check
BOOM observed the image closely and found several anomalies in the photo. We looked at Yogi Adityanath's picture and noticed major quality discrepancies between Adityanath's photo and the crowd's image. We also noted that the photo shows several people in the crowd focusing their mobile phone camera in a different direction.
Taking a cue from this, we cropped out the Yogi Adityanath's image and performed a reverse image search on the internet. The search led us to a India Today article published on December 20, 2021 and found a picture where Yogi Adityanath can be seen waving at a rally. The image credited news agency Press Trust of India (PTI).
The caption with the photo reads as, "UP CM Yogi Adityanath waves towards supporters during the inauguration of BJP's 'Jan Vishwas Yatra' on Sunday ahead of the 2022 UP elections." Yogi Adityanath also posted the same photo on his official twitter handle on December 19, 2021.
We then compared the viral photo with the PTI's image and noticed striking similarities between them. The comparison can be seen below.
Furthermore, BOOM also did an image forensics on the picture purportedly showing Yogi Adityanath waving at the crowd in his recent Etawah rally using InVid tool. The Fusion parameter showed us Adityanath's "Etawah" photo is morphed and his picture was made using a digital addition process.
The analysis result can be seen below.
According to ScienceDirect, "Image fusion combines two or more registered images of the same object into a single image that is more easily interpreted than any of the originals."
BOOM also found that the background image of the crowd was taken from the rally in Etawah. However, it is not clear why the image was morphed.
We compared the skyline made up of trees and buildings in the morphed image and a screen shot from the LIVE video and found that it shows the same rally in Etawah. The comparison can be seen below.
(A previous version of this story stated the date of the rally in Etawah, Uttar Pradesh as February 15, 2021. The error is regretted.)
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