Doctored ‘bikini in Ganga’ video goes viral; News18 runs it without verification

The story uses screenshots and not the actual viral video in view of its sensitive nature.

A 12-second long video is going viral on social media where a woman is seen bathing in river water while wearing a bikini.

The video was posted on September 15 by X user Barkha Trehan, who describes herself as ‘Activist | Voice Of Men | President, Purush Aayog’. She wrote, “Location : Haridwar. Madam: My Body My Choice. Your take ??” The video garnered over 1 million views. (Archive)

In her X bio, Trehan identifies herself as a “men’s rights activist” and the “president of Purush Aayog”. She also claims to be a TEDx speaker and a “Hindu entrepreneur”; she apparently also “directed a documentary titled The Curse of Manhood”.

Media outlet News 18 Hindi published a report with screenshots from the video pointing out that it had angered social media users. (Archive)

This same video was posted by content creator Piyali Banerjee, where she questioned the “basic decency” and “knowledge of clothing” of the woman.

Other social media users also shared the same video with similar captions, questing the woman for wearing a bikini in Haridwar, with misogynistic comments about her character.

The video is also viral on Instagram.

Fact Check

To verify its authenticity, we ran a reverse image search on a few keyframes from the viral clip. This search led us to a reel posted on Instagram on August 18. The 21-second-long reel was uploaded by an account named ‘ishika_pandit’. It showed the same woman bathing at the same spot, but wearing completely different clothes.

This video matched the background of the viral clip with the steel railing on the river and the foundations of a bridge clearly visible in the background. The woman’s hand gestures also mirror the viral video, and the same two men are visible in both videos.

Based on these similarities, it can be concluded that the video uploaded on August 18 is the original footage. The woman in the original video is seen wearing a yellow suit, and not a bikini. Thus, the viral clip is a doctored version of the original video, manipulating the attire of the woman.

Some social media users highlighted the possibility of the viral clip being an AI-generated deepfake, claiming that the woman’s clothes had been purposely changed from a suit to a bikini. (Archive)

However, when we ran the video through Hive Moderation to check whether it was an AI-generated deepfake, the result was negative.

A few hours after posting the viral clip criticising the woman’s attire, Piyali Banerjee posted the original video, but continued to question the woman’s choice of clothing. (Archive)

On further investigation, we came across the Instagram account of Sonam Yadav, with 359,000 followers, who had posted the same video of herself taking a dip in the Ganga river at Haridwar on June 6.

On September 15, after the doctored video had gone viral, Yadav posted two videos on her account, clarifying that her bathing video from Har Ki Pauri ghat in Haridwar had been doctored and circulated on social media. She warned social media users against sharing the doctored video, saying that she had filed a legal complaint in the matter.

Thus, to sum up, a doctored video of a woman was circulated on social media, manipulating her attire, with the false claim she was bathing in the Ganga in Haridwar wearing a bikini.

This story was originally published by Alt News and has been republished with permission.