A video of a man dressed in a rather realistic looking Batman costume and walking through a cloud of smoke at a site of protest is doing the rounds on many social media platforms as a scene from the recent US Capitol violence.
However, the said clip is actually from one of the anti-racism protests that took place in Philadelphia last year and has no connection with what transpired at the US Capitol recently.
The claim
Hosts of social media users including a few journalists have been sharing the aforementioned video along with captions such as, "Batman has arrived at the capitol building in Washington D.C." and "Batman is here in the midst of this chaos created by Trump's fanatical cult."
The video went viral across Twitter in no time as one of the users garnered over 1.75 lakh views on his post while another amassed more than 42,000 views.
American Protest and entry of Batman like Dark Knight Rises??#Batman #Trump #LockHimUp #
— CA Ashutosh Soni (@CA_AshutoshSoni) January 7, 2021
pic.twitter.com/OhAO1CqTf9
Reputed business news website Moneycontrol also shared the same clip in connection with the chaos at the US Capitol. "Pro-Donald Trump mob storms US Capitol in bid to overturn the election & amidst the chaos, #Batman arrives at the #USCapitolBuilding," read a now-deleted tweet by the popular media outlet.
Fact-check:
After conducting a thorough investigation, the fact-checking desk of International Business Times, India, was able to conclude that the claims being made in regards to the viral clip are completely false.
A reverse-image search of a screengrab taken from the concerned video revealed that the visuals in it are from an anti-racism demonstration which was held in Philadelphia in May 2020 to protest the brutal killing of Geroge Floyd.
The video was widely covered by multiple media outlets back then and the man dressed as Batman was identified as Bob Gable, a resident of Bensalem. The 43-year-old is popularly known as 'Bucks County Batman' as he owns a Batsuit worth $12,000.
On May 31, 2020, Gable had tweeted the clip from his verified Instagram account along with the caption, "Saving my city, be right back..."
Therefore, it is now clear that a previous video of Gable is being falsely linked to the violent protests at the US Capitol. However, he did arrive as Batman at one of the locations where supporters of US President Donald Trump had been protesting but the video in question is certainly an old one.
