Amidst the celebration of the Glastonbury Festival, a five-day performing arts festival held annually in Somerset, England, a set of photos of the festival’s grounds littered with garbage has been shared online. It is being claimed that this was the scene after a ‘performance’ by environmentalist Greta Thunberg.

Twitter user @Navrang shared these photos with the caption, “Scene around #Pyramid stage in #Glastonbury after the ‘performance’ of great environmentalist Greta Thunberg!”.

Various users have shared these photos with similar captions. All of these tweets attempt to portray Thunberg as a hypocrite.

Amish Devgan, the managing editor of News18 Hindi, also quote tweeted one of the viral tweets saying, “You are environmentalist Really [sic].”

Fact-check

We started with verifying whether Greta Thunberg had actually attended the 2022 edition of the Glastonbury Festival. A quick scroll through Thunberg’s Twitter profile informs that she did.

Comparing the viral photo of Thunberg on stage with the one tweeted by her on Twitter, we can easily verify that this image is indeed from 2022. This can also be confirmed through news reports published on June 26, the same day as Thunberg’s tweet.

Photo 1

The photo of a man in camouflage attire walking through a pile of trash near the Pyramid Stage is from 2011. We performed a Google reverse image search and came across a blog by photographer Ben Birchall of Press Association. In his blog, Ben has documented the 2011 Glastonbury Festival. The photo is available in this blog.

When we opened this image in a new tab, the URL also helped us confirm that the photo was uploaded on the WordPress blog in 2011.

Photo 2

The photo of where we have a direct look at the stage, with trash scattered all around, is from 2015. We yet again performed a Google reverse image search and came across a news report by Daily Mail published in 2015. In the bottom-left corner of the photo, we can see that the image has been credited to David Hedges of SWNS.

Photo 3

The photo of the abandoned chairs with trash surrounding them is most likely from 2017. Using Google reverse image search, we came across a blog called Expert Skip Hire, where a blog post titled ‘Cleaning up the waste at Glastonbury‘ carries the same image. The blog was published in 2017.

While it is not credited to a photographer, it is still safe to conclude the image is not from 2022 as the image can be found on multiple blogs prior to 2022.

The official Twitter handle of Glastonbury Festival also tweeted a photo of a clean field on June 27 – thanking those who helped clean up the trash post-festival.

To conclude, old photos of the Glastonbury Festival were shared by multiple users on social media to target Greta Thunberg.

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About the Author

Kalim is a journalist with a keen interest in tech, misinformation, culture, etc