Authors
Preeksha is a journalism graduate interested in exploring and working on the phenomenon of fake news globally. She desires to work on compelling stories that employ digital journalism to bring forth narratives that matter. She is also a budding researcher, studying the COVID-19 infodemic as a research fellow with the Institute of Economic Growth.
Amidst ensuing war between Ukraine-Russia, social media has been swarmed with videos claiming to show military movement in the region.
Many of these viral claims have turned out to be old videos that are being re-circulated in the context of the current war. Some of them have also turned out to be gaming footage being misused to claim alleged attacks in Ukraine by Russia.
Newschecker has been on the forefront of debunking such false and misleading claims. The claims debunked by Newschecker on the theme can be found here.
US Paratroopers in Ukraine?
A page named ‘Current News Update’ on Facebook has posted a 6 minutes 59 seconds long video with the caption “American soldiers in Ukraine Sky”.
The video shows a plane taking off from a runway with a number of US army personnel boarding the plane. The video at 6:52 seconds onwards starts showing paratroopers descending from the plane to the ground by jumping out of the plane with parachutes.
The said video has been watched 7.6 million times and has received over 2 lakh reactions on the Facebook page.
Factcheck/Verification
To ascertain if the video in question was actually from Ukraine as claimed by the page ‘Current News Updates’, Newschecker investigated the video further.
Using the ‘InVID’ video verification tool we obtained the key frames of the 6 minutes 59 seconds long video. We then reverse image searched many key frames of the video on various search engines.
One of the key frames returned a match on the Russian search engine Yandex.
We then searched the search results on Yandex and found that it returned two links which referred to the said video as a ‘Mandatory US paratrooper exercise’ & ‘Paratroopers in North Carolina jump out of plane in formation during a practice run Daily Mail Online’.
These links led us to one Facebook page by the name ‘Mandatory‘ and the second was to the website of Daily Mail UK.
The Daily Mail article was titled “Look out below! Hundreds of paratroopers descend on North Carolina during exercise”. It also had a slightly longer version of the same video in the article.
The video in the article had ‘YouTube/ AiirSource Military’ written on the lower left hand side corner. This indicated the source of the video to be this YouTube channel.
We then searched YouTube for the channel by the name ‘AiirSource Military’ along with the keywords ‘US paratroopers’
This led us to a video that looked like the same video as shared by the page ‘Current News Updates’.
The video on the YouTube channel was the same as the one posted by The Daily Mail UK. The video on the said YouTube channel was 5 years old.
The video was accompanied by the caption “Paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Division perform static line jumps from C-17 Globemaster III aircraft over Sicily Drop Zone at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.” on the YouTube channel.
This confirmed that the video in question is 5 years old and shows Paratroopers performing a ‘static line jump’ in North Carolina, USA.
Rating- False context /False
Conclusion
The video of US paratroopers jumping from a plane does not show them in the Ukraine sky. The video in question is 5 years old and is from North Carolina, USA.
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Authors
Preeksha is a journalism graduate interested in exploring and working on the phenomenon of fake news globally. She desires to work on compelling stories that employ digital journalism to bring forth narratives that matter. She is also a budding researcher, studying the COVID-19 infodemic as a research fellow with the Institute of Economic Growth.
