Claim: A Twitter user has shared a video suggesting that thousands of football fans watching a football game at the 2022 FIFA World Cup were singing aloud ‘Calm down,’ a popular song by Nigerian rapper Rema.
Verdict: DUBAWA Ghana has found the video to have been manipulated. The audio in the video, which is the song and an audience reaction, was imported from an unrelated event.
Full Text
A Twitter user’s post suggests that spectators at one of the stadiums hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar were ‘jamming’ to ‘Calm down,’ a song by Nigerian rapper and musician Rema, at halftime. The video has attracted over 500,000 views and has been retweeted over 7,000 times.
DUBAWA Ghana has noticed that several other accounts on Twitter, including a verified user, have posted the video, making the same claim. These can be found here, here, and here.
Although the claimants indicated that the incident of spectators singing aloud happened at halftime during a World Cup game, they were neither specific on which stadium it happened at nor the countries that were playing at the time.
Verification
Our investigation was to find out if the incident of the spectators singing as loud as it appeared in the viral video actually did happen.
During our search, we came across a Youtube video dated July 21, 2022, that was posted by TMC, a verified channel on the video sharing and social media platform. The video was titled “Rema – Calm Down (Live Performance at Festival Hall, Melbourne 2022).”
Having analysed the audio from the video, we observed that the audio in the 55 seconds viral video was the same as the one in the video, which had been uploaded months earlier by TMC.
For instance, the same DJ sound alert could be heard within the first six seconds of the two videos.
Unlike the verified video, which has close shots of music fans jamming to the song’s rhythm in its natural environment, the one in the stadium showed no clear faces or movement from the fans, except the audio plastered on faceless fans.
During our investigation, we also came across another 55-second video that had been posted on the popular social media platform TikTok. The footage was captured in a stadium setting with the same audio of music lovers jamming to the song. After a visual analysis of the video, we found that the visual had been looped – after the first eight seconds, the same scene is repeated until the end of the video.
Again, the stadium in the TikTok video appears to be different from the one seen in the viral videos on Twitter. Furthermore, in the viral Twitter videos, the stadium light can be seen to have gone off and come on, and the stadium lights’ colour is changed like it was in a night-club setting. However, these incidents are missing in the TikTok video, which also claims that football fans were jamming to Rema’s ‘Calm Down’ song.
Conclusion
The narrative that spectators at the stadium were singing aloud, backed with audio of people singing, is false. We have found the audio to have come from an unrelated event.
