Fact-check: Viral image misleadingly tied to Modi's road show revealed as Olympic torch relay in China

Guwahati: An image depicting a sizable crowd amassed on the streets is circulating on various social media platforms, purportedly from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent road show in Telangana's Kollapur.

An archive of the post can be found here.

You can view an archive of the post here.

More archives of similar claims can be viewed here and here

However, this same image is being falsely represented to depict a protest in Gujarat against Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

But are these claims valid? Not quite. Neither is the image from Telangana nor from Gujarat.

In fact, its origins trace back to at least May 2008 when it captured a crowd gathered for the Olympic torch procession in Guangzhou, China, not far from the site of the Sichuan earthquake.

Unraveling the truth behind this viral image involved leveraging tools like Google Lens, which led us to discover the same visual on an online platform called 'Flickr'.

The image's metadata revealed its publication date as May 12, 2008, with a caption indicating its context during the Olympic torch relay.

Further corroboration was found in an article from The Atlantic, which extensively covered the 2008 Olympics in China, including the relay of the Olympic torch across various cities in the country.

In conclusion, it's evident that this aged and unrelated image is being misrepresented as a recent snapshot from PM Modi's Telangana road show.

This story is republished from The Quint as part of the Shakti Collective. Read the original story here.