Fake images of US college protests circulate in China

Pro-Palestinian protests on U.S. college campuses have gotten attention on Chinese social media, but some of these posts show unrelated demonstrations that happened months or even years earlier.

One aerial video showing a massive gathering of thousands of people packed together – purported to be at Columbia University in New York – is actually a demonstration in January in Hamburg, Germany, against a far-right political group.

Another photo claimed to show a protester holding up a famous Mao Zedong quote in Chinese, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” But Asia Fact Check Lab found this to be from a pro-gun rally held in Virginia in 2020. 

As the Israeli-Hamas conflict drags into its seventh month, student demonstrations supporting the Palestininans and calling for a cease-fire have spread across dozens of U.S. university campuses.

The aerial video of thousands gathered in public was shared on the popular Chinese social media platform Weibo on April 28, with the breathless caption: “U.S. university demonstration: Pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University is majestic!” 

But a reverse image search found the video, shared on TikTok  Jan. 21, 2024, actually depicted 80,000 people in Hamburg, Germany, protesting against the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party “since their ‘secret meeting’ with the fascist Identitarian Movement was revealed.

Keyword searches including “AfD” found the Hamburg demonstrations were one amongst a series of protests to break out against the party after a news report surfaced that the group had considered a plan to expel all people of “non-German backgrounds” from the country, including immigrants who have already obtained residency at a meeting with influential leaders.

In another case, a number of Weibo influencers and X accounts also recently claimed that one protester at an unspecified college campus held up a poster with the Mao quote, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” 

But this is false. The photo is from a pro-gun rally held in Virginia in 2020, and has nothing to do with any pro-Palestine demonstration. 

A reserve image search reveals that a version of the same image shown in a larger frame was published in an article published on the Chinese military news blog Sina Military in 2020

Keyword searches using visual clues from the photo, including a banner that reads Constitutional Conservatives, found that it shows a rally held by pro-gun advocates from all across the U.S. in Richmond in 2020. 

A closer look at the image also shows a street sign reading “N. 9th St.” at the top of the frame. A search in Google Maps found that this was a street in Richmond and not part of the university campus. 

Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Shen Ke, Taejun Kang and Malcolm Foster.

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