By Oladele Rashidat
A video purporting to show an angel seen in Brazil has been circulating on popular social media sites namely Instagram, YouTube TikTok, among others. As of the time of this reporting, an Instagram post on Thursday, October 19, 2023, on gist lover media outlet with the description “chaos as people ran for their lives after spotting real a life Angel Gabriel” had received 439 thousand views, 6,316 comments, and 7,584 shares.
A few blog readers expressed skepticism regarding the information. As an example, @able ssoo “You should carry your bobble once more if you believe that angels look like this.”
Claim
Angel Gabriel spotted in Brazil
Findings:
Nature fact conducted an intensive research for verification of the video. Several tools were deployed. Google reverse image results showed that the video had appeared in other media platforms YouTube, TikTok. On YouTube the video was posted 7 month ago with 4,200 views by Great Star Media with a caption “An angel spotted accending to heaven in Brazil”
A critical review of the video showed that it was uploaded from a TikTok handle @myuz-gaza1 who is keen on posting such video as his TikTok accounts. A subscriber of the YouTube page @Nesa commented “it was a nice video edit”
Forensically a photo forensic tool was also used to conduct verify the video. It showed that the video comprises of several infusions of other videos merge together seamlessly to cause confusion. The noise analysis showed high degree of noise indicating that the video was tempered with.
Invid metadata analysis reviewed that the image was generated using standard JPEG library, many smart phone, GIMP (GNU Image Manipulative Program). GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows and more operating systems. It is free software, you can change its source code and distribute your changes.
Verdict: MISLEADING
Video’s narrative is manipulated and misleading