By Archis Chowdhury
A video showing Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut with a frown on his face, while being interviewed about the political crisis in the party, is viral on social media with the claim that Raut has been pushed to tears by the current situation.
BOOM found this claim to be false; we looked at the original video on Aaj Tak's YouTube channel, where the frown on Raut's face is not visible at all, and his expression remains neutral. Snapchat's popular 'crying' filter was utilised to doctor the video, and add the frown on Raut's face.
The video is being shared in the backdrop of Maharashtra's ongoing political crisis with Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition government on the brink of collapsing following an exit of several rebel MLAs in Shiv Sena to the BJP led by Eknath Shinde, Cabinet Minister of Urban Development and Public Works in the state government.
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The video, which appears to be a phone recording of an interview of Sanjay Raut shown on television , was found being shared on Facebook with the following caption:
Original Hindi caption: "#भक्तो रुला दिया ना नॉटी को"
English translation: "Bhakts made the naughty cry"
The video had garnered over 16,000 views at the time of writing this article.
We searched for the caption on Facebook and Twitter, and found the video going viral with the exact caption on both the social media platforms (Facebook search result, Twitter search result).
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Fact-Check
BOOM started looking for recent interviews of Raut by the media on Hindi channels, and came across the original version of the interview on Hindi news channel Aaj Tak done by anchor Sahil Joshi.
Looking through this original version of the video, we could not trace any frown on Raut's face, as seen in the viral video.
We took screenshots from the viral video, and matched it with screenshots from the original video taken at the same moment, and found that the phone recording of the interview going viral was doctored to add a frown on Raut's face, to give the appearance of him crying. In the original video, Raut's expression clearly remains neutral.
Here is an example of the comparison:
The following is yet another example of the comparison between the two videos:
Another keyword search to find methods to add such an effect led us to the popular 'crying filter' introduced by the instant messaging app Snapchat. Once the filter is turned out, it adds a 'crying' effect on faces detected by the camera of the phone.
Here is a video explaining the crying filter, and how to use it.
