Claim: Imran Khan called for an emergency press conference at 3pm a day before the long march was supposed to begin, at Shahrah e Quaid e Azam, Lahore.
Fact: Imran Khan never called for an emergency press conference, and the long march began as scheduled.
On 27 October 2022, several social media posts on Facebook and Twitter shared an Express News screenshot claiming that Imran Khan had called for an emergency press conference at the Shahrah e Quaid e Azam in Lahore at 3pm.
A popular broadcast journalist also shared the same claim to his Twitter account here.
Fact or Fiction?
The claim is misleading. News of an emergency press conference implies that there has been an update on the situation of the long march, which Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) announced on 25 October 2022.
The march began as planned and senior PTI leader Fawad Chaudhry clarified in this tweet on the same day Imran Khan has not called for an emergency press conference and that the party’s immediate focus is the long march.
Virality
Soch Fact Check conducted a CrowdTangle analysis for the 3-day period since 27 October 2022 to 29 October 2022 using the following search terms:
- “Imran Khan” “press conference” “emergency”
- “پریس کانفرنس“ ”ہنگامی“ ”عمران خان”
We found 218 posts on Facebook, which gathered 104,239 interactions. Some of them can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
Several tweets can also be found here, here, here, here and here.
Conclusion: Imran Khan did not call for an emergency press conference at 3pm on 27 October 2022.