Claim: A social media user has claimed that a Ghanaian television station, TV3, announced the death of Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II, with a video of dancing pallbearers.
The claim is false. DUBAWA has found the viral video to have been manipulated. Moreover, the video, in its original form, existed almost a year before the death of Prince Philip in 2021.
Full Text
On Thursday, September 8, 2022, a Twitter user posted a video featuring the famous Ghanaian dancing pallbearers and claimed that their performance on a local television station was part of production plans to announce the death of Prince Philip, the former Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II.
The video, which has attracted over a million views within 6 hours after posting, has the logo of TV3, a privately owned Ghanaian free-to-air television network, at its top right corner.
There is a text at the bottom of the video. Even though it was difficult to read, we were able to find the following words: “Prince Philips Dies: Buckingham Palace has announced His Royal Highness, the Duke of **** has died” (**** was used because the text was difficult to read in the video)
The 1-minute and 31 seconds video has been retweeted over 9,000 times with 46.3K likes.
Several comments observed by DUBAWA suggest that other users believe that indeed the Ghanaian television channel announced the death of Prince Philip in such a manner.
It is worth noting that the post being investigated is not the first to make such a claim. In April 2021, a video uploaded on Youtube by the channel lomao500 had the title “Ghana tv mourns Prince Philip with a little joke.” The video uploaded by this user is the same as what is being investigated.
Verification
In investigating the claim, we found that the video had been uploaded on YouTube by TV3 Ghana. The 1-minute 53 seconds video uploaded on April 17, 2020, by the television channel on YouTube did not have a crawling message as the viral video had depicted.
The title for the video was “Dada Awu (Tafregya Pallbearers) Dancing on Showbiz360 with Giovani.”
A longer version of the video, also available on YouTube on the TV3 Ghana channel, also did not have a crawling message. After analyzing the full video, we observed that the presence of the pallbearers and the show in its entirety was not related to the death of Prince Philip.
On Twitter, we noticed that other users had posted shorter videos that had some of the scenes in the viral video. In all of these videos, there was no crawler. These posts can be seen here, here, here, and here.
Moreover, Prince Philip died in April 2021, but the show on which the pallbearers made an appearance was in April 2020.
Conclusion
DUBAWA has analyzed the full video and has found the claim to be false. We found the video to be unrelated to the death of Prince Philip. Moreover, the video, in its original form, existed almost a year before the death of Prince Philip in 2021.
