A video broadcast on Iranian television claims to show a drone flying over a United States aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. Some of the footage is false, and some are out of context. The FRANCE 24 Observers team analyzed the video and separated fact from fiction.
The Pakistani army shot down at least one Indian military jet overnight from February 26-27, escalating tensions between the two nuclear powers.
The footage is impressive: It shows a surfer riding an immense wave, and he looks miniscule against the towering wall of water. The video was filmed back in 2017 but it recently popped up on social media and started circulating widely.
A number of readers in West Africa sent messages to the FRANCE 24 Observers team asking us to fact-check a video that has been shared across WhatsApp groups in the region. In the video, a palm tree is apparently floating through the air, as if by magic.
A video widely shared in Iran starting in late August 2018 shows a man removing what he says is an electronic listening device from a tree in Tehran. In fact, the device is a digital tag installed by a software company to identify and protect trees.
Since mid-August, a mysterious photo of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad leaning on a rustic walking stick has been widely shared on social media in Turkey – with captions saying he’s spending his retirement herding sheep in his village. It is not true: in fact Ahmadinejad is still in Tehran, still involved in politics, and facing multiple allegations of corruption. The photograph shows Ahmadinejad in a forested area, in a padded jacket, with a stout stick in his hands. The photo has been published by a Twitter account with 2.2 million followers, an Instagram page with 1.6 million followers, and dozens of Facebook pages with hundreds of thousands of followers between them. This Facebook page on August 14 published an undated photograph showing former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The caption in Turkish reads: “Ahmadinejad is herding sheep in his village now, not like our politicians taking money from the state after retirement.” What is false in this story? First off, Ahmadinejad does not live in a village; he lives in his house in the Narmak …
Large-scale demonstrations have been going on in several different Iraqi cities since July 8, the day that people living in the economic capital, Basra, began taking to the streets to
You may be one of the millions of people who has seen this video since it was first posted online on May 4.
Several social media posts in French and in Arabic claim that an amateur video shows former dictator Saddam Hussein’s corpse still intact, 12 years after his death.
In the hours after Iranian-born Nasim Aghdam’s shooting attack on the YouTube headquarters, when she wounded three people and killed herself, figures from the pro-Trump alt-right in the US were quick to associate her with radical Islam. But in fact, her own posts suggest she was critical of radical Islam, skeptical of Iran’s religious regime and not a Muslim herself.
Ershad Alijani 