Claim: A picture is being circulated with the claim that it shows the crowd gathered on a street during Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s recent ‘Amar Bil Maroof’ rally in Islamabad.
Fact: The image is, in fact, from a protest held in Turkey in 2007.
On 27 March 2022, Facebook user Asad S. Mirza shared a picture of a large number of people crowding a street during what he claimed was the ‘Amar Bil Maroof’ rally organised by Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. The post was accompanied by the event’s hashtag, “#امربالمعروف”, and the following caption:
“شیطان آپ کو شئیر کرنے سے روکے گا
[Satan will stop you from sharing this post]”
Fact or fiction?
Soch Fact Check used Google Reverse Image Search and TinEye Reverse Image Search to investigate the source of the image claimed to be from the ‘Amar Bil Maroof’ rally and found that the picture is from a protest in Turkey.
The demonstrations pictured took place on 19 January 2007 after Turkish journalist and editor Hrant Dink was assassinated in Istanbul. The TinEye search turned up an image shared online on 11 March 2013. This image matched up with the result of a related Google search — “manifestação 15 de setembro” — which revealed an image published on this page on 16 September 2012.
Soch Fact Check also came across a May 2020 Medium blog by Ani Calis titled, “The murder that united people — in the memory of Hrant Dink, Armenian activist,” in which the author speaks about Dink’s work for the Armenians, his experiences as a minority in Turkey, and his assassination in 2007.
Calis shared the picture in question with the caption, “Part of the crowd in 2007 just after Dink was murdered.”
The image also appeared on the Billy News blog on 16 September 2012.
Soch Fact Check concludes that the image is not from the PTI’s ‘Amar Bil Maroof’ rally recently held in Islamabad and the claim is, therefore, false. The picture is actually from the demonstrations held in Istanbul following journalist Hrant Dink’s murder.
Virality
Soch Fact Check conducted a CrowdTangle analysis, which revealed more than 100 interactions across posts about the ‘Amar Bil Maroof’ rally with the same image over the past three days.
Asad S. Mirza’s post was shared 25 times and received close to 100 reactions, while another Facebook user, Awais Khalidi, also posted the picture, claiming it was from the ‘Amar Bil Maroof’ rally, but with a longer caption, “شیطان آپ کو شئیر کرنے سے روکے گا شئیر کریں حق کے لئے۔دین کیلئے ۔ایمان کیلئے ۔پاکستان کے لئے۔ [Satan will stop you from sharing; share for the truth, for religion, for faith, for Pakistan].”
Conclusion: The image being linked to the PTI’s ‘Amar Bil Maroof’ rally in Islamabad is, in fact, from a demonstration held in Istanbul in 2007 following the assassination of Turkish journalist and activist Hrant Dink.
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