In the days after a deadly attack by Hamas militants on Israel, many social media users were sharing a 2-year-old video of Palestinian supporters marching in Chicago and presenting it as new.
“Pro Palestine march in Chicago now … THIS IS GETTING REAL FOLKS … Stay awake!! 10/8/23,” read sticker text atop an Oct. 8 TikTok video.
The video showed a mass of people, some carrying a Palestinian flag, marching down a Chicago street and chanting, “free, free Palestine.”
TikTok identified this video as part of its efforts to counter inauthentic, misleading or false content. (Read more about PolitiFact’s partnership with TikTok.)
We found numerous examples of people sharing the video on TikTok and across other social media platforms and presenting it as a recent march.
There was a rally of Palestinian supporters in Chicago on Oct. 8, the day after the Hamas attack. According to news reports, hundreds of people rallied outside the city’s Israeli consulate to call for a free Palestine.
But footage from this rally isn’t what’s in many of the videos currently circulating on social media.
Those posts share a video showing a throng of Palestinian supporters who had gathered in May 2021, in Chicago’s Loop, one of several protests held in the city amid an 11-day conflict that month between Hamas and Israel.
Using a reverse-image search, we found the same video posted May 17, 2021, on VK, a Russian social media site, from an account called Voice of Palestine. Reuters and Agence France-Presse fact-checkers also traced it to videos posted in 2021 on X and Facebook.
The TikTok video and others like it suggesting the video is related to the current conflict in Israel is False.
