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PeakMetrics / Fact Checks

Politics & government fact checks

Explore claims publishers have checked about politics & government. Read their original ratings and follow the evidence.

12,741 published reviews in this topic

FACTLYPolitics & government

A photo captured during a public event where Jawaharlal Nehru was slapped by Swami Vidyanand Videh

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

The claim concerns a photo said to show Swami Vidyanand Videh slapping Jawaharlal Nehru at a public event. The review identifies the image as a photograph from a 1962 Congress Party meeting in Patna, Bihar, and says it depicts a security person restraining Nehru from entering a riotous crowd—not a slap. It reports that the post added a story about Videh confronting Nehru over remarks about Arya Samaj members, but the photo’s actual provenance does not support that account. To check the image, the investigation used reverse image search. It found the same photograph on Outlook and the Associated Press (AP), with captions identifying Nehru and describing the crowd-control scene. The AP caption, as quoted in the review, places the meeting in Patna in January 1962. The review also says a 1962 Indian Express article concerned the clash and that several news organisations later issued clarifications about the image’s origin. The review separately searched for information about Swami Vidyanand Videh. It describes him as the founder of Ved-Sansthan and a scholar of the Vedas, but says it found no information or evidence that he slapped Nehru at a public meeting. The image’s documented context, together with the lack of evidence for the alleged encounter, does not substantiate the claim that the photo captured a slap.

dpaPolitics & government

Diese Fotos zeigen SPÖ-Chef Andreas Babler im Urlaub.

Publisher’s rating: Die Fotos stammen aus einem Online-Blog. Eines davon wurde manipuliert. Die genannten Zitate von Fußi und Herr sind alt und haben mit der aktuellen Causa nichts zu tun.

The photos circulated shortly before Babler’s re-election as SPÖ chair at a party conference in Graz, with claims that they showed him at a luxury hotel in Cyprus. The review identifies the pictured location as the five-star Columbia Beach resort in Pissouri. It says the background buildings visible in one photo match hotel images, including their architectural style, window arrangement and palm trees. Thus, the evidence supports that a photo places Babler at the resort, but it does not establish that every circulating image is an unaltered photograph. The review finds that the second image was composited: the original shows Babler sitting at a table in front of a stone wall and looking at his phone, while the circulating version replaces that background with a pool image from the hotel. The review reports that it located the original on Booking.com and that the manipulated version appeared in an exxpress article and on social media. The claim is therefore incomplete if understood to mean that both photos are genuine, unedited views of Babler at the hotel. A Facebook collage also presented remarks by Rudi Fußi and Julia Herr as evidence of current internal criticism of Babler’s lifestyle. The review says those remarks concerned different events: Fußi’s was about Pamela Rendi-Wagner’s 2019 visit to a luxury restaurant in Saint-Tropez, while Herr’s August 2023 comment concerned Mark Mateschitz and Victoria Swarovski’s yacht holiday. It further reports that Herr defended Babler’s short holiday rather than criticizing it.