Claim: A video shows a large public rally in Lahore during Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) election campaign for the Punjab elections in March 2023.
Fact: The clip is old and does not show the PTI election rally in Lahore. It is from Imran Khan’s “Azadi March” back in November 2022 when he entered the city of Gujranwala with his supporters.
On 13 March 2023, a Twitter account Pak Lawyers Forum shared a video (archived) with the caption, “Dear world, See for yourself where #Pakistan stands today. #ImranKhan took off his election campaign with a #Rally in #Lahore today. This is gigantic. This is a new beginning only if you have eyes to see…!!!”
The video shows different angles of a crowd of the public with media vans on the road. The video was shared after PTI started its campaign in Lahore for Punjab’s upcoming election.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check conducted an InVID analysis on the video keyframes and found the same video posted on 1 November 2022. The Urdu language caption of the video tweet, when translated into English, reads, “People, on their own, are now regularly entering Gujranwala. The place where stones were pelted on Long March in 2014 is now Imran’s stronghold.”
Another video posted on Facebook on 1 November also features a similar location to the video shared with the false claim.
Virality
The false claim received 481.4k views, 7000 likes, and more than 3000 retweets.
It has been shared here and here on Twitter and here on Facebook.
Conclusion: The video claiming that it shows an election rally is not from Lahore 2023. The video is from PTI’s march in Gujranwala in November 2022.