Social media posts with video footage claiming that protesters stormed the White House in Washington D.C. are false as the building shown in the video is the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio.
Protests broke across several cities in the United States following the death of an African-American man, George Floyd, who died after being pinned to the ground by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 25, 2020. Footage shot by witnesses showed a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, with his knee on Floyd's neck for close to nine minutes as the latter stopped responding.
Since then, scenes of protests, looting, vandalism and a violent crackdown by police on protesters and media persons have flooded social media.
Several posts online, including the one below, claim that the White House was stormed by angry protesters and purportedly showed protesters on the West Lawn of the compound.
Similar claims were made on Twitter.
The video was also uploaded on YouTube with the Arabic title: 'America demonstrators storm the White House .. Protesters stormed the White House after killing more than one brown person.'
The archive of the Twitter post can be found here; Facebook posts here and here and the YouTube upload here.
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BOOM Live also received the video on WhatsApp with the claim that US President Donald Trump has fled the White House. The text of the forward reads: "Protestors already broke inside White House for the first time in American history, gun fire at east gate and some sources said Trump fleed with his family to Kansas, CIA have emergency meeting in an hour!"
Fact Check
While people were protesting outside the White House, it was not stormed in by protesters. Protesters reportedly threw rocks at the White House and pulled at police barricades. Secret Service agents also reportedly shepherded US president Donald Trump into a secret bunker on Friday night.
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Many users on Twitter refuted the false tweet and claimed that the building was, in fact, the Ohio Statehouse. BOOM came across a report filed by Columbus-based news website NBC4i from May 28 which reported that protesters had broken into the Statehouse. A video report of the incident is below.
A reverse image search on Google found that the building bore a striking resemblance to the Ohio Statehouse. A closer examination of the screenshots showed several visible identifiers of the building. BOOM compared the screenshots with Google Street View images of the Ohio Statehouse as well as a photo uploaded by the Ohio State Development Corporation on their website.
Below are the screenshot comparisons. The identifiers are circled in red.
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The Ohio Statehouse can be seen on Google Street View in Columbus, Ohio.
