A video showing the image of Indian National Congress President Rahul Gandhi displayed on Dubai's Burj Khalifa skyscraper appears to be fake and has been created using a video editing app.
The video, which is viral on Twitter and Facebook, claims that the building displayed Gandhi's photo on its facade to welcome him as part of his visit to the United Arab Emirates. Gandhi is set to visit Dubai on January 11, 2019.
The clip, which shows a sound and light display, is being shared on social media with captions in many languages claiming, "When Rahul Gandhi's picture was displayed at Burj Khalifa."
FACT-CHECK
BOOM reached out to ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller, the public relations team of Burj Khalifa and will update the story upon receiving a reply.
We also analysed the video and ran a reverse image search which showed no results. There were also no news reports from India or Dubai reporting about Rahul Gandhi's picture being displayed on the Burj Khalifa.
The closest we came to was an Economic Times article from October 2018 when Mahatma Gandhi's image was displayed on the tower.
Dubai's Burj Khalifa was lit up with Mahatma Gandhi's picture and his quotes on his 150th birth anniversary.
A further analysis of the video showed that all them had the watermark 'Biugo' on the right hand corner of the video.
A search for 'Biugo' showed results for a photo and video editing mobile application. According to the description on the Google play store, Biugo is a 'video maker and photo cutout' app.
BOOM downloaded the same to test it out and found that the home screen of the application has various templates including one of the Burj Khalifa.
The home screen has a template of the Burj Khalifa building and allows you to add a picture of your choice on it. Clicking on the Burj Khalifa template leads the user to a video featuring a stock image on the facade of the building. The music on this video is the same as the music on the viral Rahul Gandhi video. The app gives the user an option to add any photo which will then appear on the facade of the building.
To test the same, BOOM added another photo of Gandhi to the Burj Khalifa template video and below were the results.
[video src="https://www.boomlive.in/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/WhatsApp-Video-Karen.mp4"]