This round-up of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s independent fact checking charity which works to give people access to reliable information they can trust.
Viral video doesn’t show the Green Party celebrating an election win
Footage from a Bengali-language video originally posted by the Green Party’s Newham mayoral candidate, Areeq Chowdhury, has been shared online with false claims it shows the Greens celebrating an election win. Posts shared thousands of times across X, Instagram and Facebook include captions such as “you’re going to want the sound on for this video of the Green Party celebrating their election victory” and “the Green Party celebrating their council election win in a foreign language”.
But the clip was actually a campaign video posted before the election on May 8. Mr Chowdhury first posted the Bengali language video on April 20, encouraging people to vote Green in the local elections. He posted similar videos with the same group of people wearing the same outfits in other languages in the run-up to polling day, including English, Urdu and Romanian. The version of the clip which has gone viral was taken from a TV segment which ran the footage in the early hours of May 8 as the election results were beginning to come in, as part of a discussion on sectarian politics.
Mr Chowdhury did not win the Newham mayoral election, and has retired as a councillor. In a statement posted on X he said: “This was not an election night victory announcement. This was a campaign video, from weeks ago, encouraging people to vote Green. The message was recorded in different languages including Bangla, Urdu and Romanian.” He also told Full Fact that “the vast majority of my campaign videos were in fluent English, my native language”.
There were not ‘over two million’ people at the Unite the Kingdom march
We have seen claims on social media that the number of people who attended the Unite the Kingdom march in London last Saturday has been estimated at “over two million”, “nearly two million” or simply “millions”. While crowd size numbers are often disputed, these figures are all much too high. Police estimates put the figure for last weekend’s march at “around 60,000” people, and an independent expert on crowd dynamics told Full Fact it definitely wasn’t millions.
Posts with thousands of shares between them on Facebook and X have claimed the crowd was estimated at “over two million” or “nearly two million”, while the political activist Tommy Robinson—who helped organise the event and whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon—claimed on the day on X that “millions are in attendance”. Experts say that accurately counting the size of a crowd at a non-ticketed event is extremely difficult. But in this case the figures circulating on social media appear to be substantial overestimates.
A Metropolitan Police spokesperson told us: “It is always challenging to estimate crowd numbers at protests and it is not unusual for there to be significant differences between police and organiser estimates. We use a combination of drone, helicopter and CCTV footage, alongside crowd density estimates, to calculate likely numbers. On this occasion we estimate there to have been around 60,000 people at the Unite the Kingdom protest.” The police estimated between 15,000 and 20,000 were at the pro-Palestinian Nakba protest going on at the same time.
Professor Milad Haghani, an associate professor at the University of Melbourne and expert in crowd dynamics, also told Full Fact that claims millions had attended the Unite the Kingdom rally were wide of the mark. He said: “The idea of a crowd of millions in a street rally is completely fanciful and more of a product of imagination and gross exaggeration. Both sides of politics are prone to magnifying their protest and rally crowds… This has been a trend.” He added: “Unfortunately some have no idea what a crowd of a million actually is.”
