Wait Until the Facts Come Out
On June 1st 2020 a video of a black man being detained by two police officers went viral and caught the internet by storm. The headlines claimed that the man was an FBI agent and that the footage was recently taken. In the video the man is sitting outside of a public venue and smoking a cigarette. He then is put under arrest because the police assume that he is a suspect of a crime that was committed. However, after they check his identification they realize that they have in fact, detained the wrong person due to profiling him.
Whether the man was profiled or not is not the question at hand here. The question at hand is whether this video was truly current news. The video went viral in the midst of mass George Floyd protests for racial injustice. I started by doing a thorough shadow analysis of the video. All shadows were the correct shapes. Also all of the shadows were pointing in the same direction.
After performing a reverse image search, I found some interesting information. The headlines for the video made viewers believe that the video was shot recently and that the man was an FBI agent. However after the reverse image search the same image was found on the website Pinterest.com on June 02, 2019. This proves that the video was not recently taken like the headlines claimed it was.
The location in the video given was Rochester, Minnesota. After a geo location analysis the location was confirmed to be at a downtown bar in Rochester, Minnesota. The Rochester Minnesota Police Department made a statement on the video once it went viral on June 1, 2020. They released a statement claiming that the man in the video was not an FBI agent, and was wrongfully identified as a suspect.
This was a case of a partially true story with partial misinformation in it as well. The man in the video was profiled by the Rochester Minnesota Police. However, he was not an FBI agent and the incident did not occur on June 1, 2020, in the midst of the George Floyd protests. After the verification techniques were implemented, the facts were set straight.
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