A video of a man lying on the wing of a plane in mid-air is circulating on social media. It is being claimed that the video shows an Afghani trying to flee Afghanistan after the Taliban took over the country. It must be pointed out that reports showing locals latching onto a military plane and men falling off aircraft mid-air have been reported in the media. Facebook page ‘Gulistan News Channel’ has posted this video, gathering over 5 lakh views at the time of writing. (Archive link)
#VIRALVIDEO | Citizens of Afghanistan scared of TB occupation hugging deaths and riding on the wings of the Airplane…….. Gulistan News don’t endorse the authenticity of this video..
Posted by Gulistan News Channel on Tuesday, August 17, 2021
Twitter user @kashmirAdolph also shared the visuals and accompanying claim. It had been viewed by more than 25,000 handles as of this writing. (Archive link)
VIDEO : Citizens of Afghanistan scared of TB occupation hugging deaths and riding on the wings of the Airplane#Afghanistan pic.twitter.com/J1B1BVjile
— 𝕬𝖉𝖔𝖑𝖕𝖍 (@kashmirAdolph) August 17, 2021
The clip is widespread on Facebook and Twitter. Alt News also received a few requests to verify it on its official mobile app.
Fact-check
We performed a reverse image search of a still from the video and found that it had been posted earlier by several other social media handles and YouTube channels in 2020. We were able to locate a version posted online on August 18, 2020 on Twitter. This original iteration was actually a TikTok video posted by the user ‘theghostofinternet’ as seen in the clip.
Apart from this, we also found a similar set of visuals in which a person was sitting on the wing of the aircraft.
After a closer look at both the clips, we noticed that they featured the same background.
We discovered that a lot of memes websites and platforms posting humourous content had shared the video (Link 1, Link 2). Yet another video with the same background can also be found online except here, a man seated on a chair is drinking a cup of tea.
We also found a YouTube video posted on December 17, 2020, where a few other videos with a similar background are shown. The ‘About’ section of the YouTube channel says that it photoshops videos from day-to-day lives.
The description of this video contains a link to the profile of a Facebook user named ‘Huy Xuân Mai. Alt News found that the viral video was posted by the user on August 17, 2020. Several other such videos can be found on his Facebook timeline. (Link 1, Link 2)
Mai identifies as the administrator of a photoshop page called ‘Photoshop Có Tâm & Troller‘. You can find many such edited and photoshopped videos on this Facebook page.
To sum it up, the video in circulation has been edited and has nothing to do with Afghanistan.
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