Claim: A video shows a Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) rally, likely from the recent protests held in August 2025.
Fact: The footage is likely AI-generated.
On 5 August, a Facebook user posted a video (archive) that apparently showed a rally organised by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf to call for the release of former Prime Minister Imran Khan. The caption in Urdu reads:
.”احمد خان نیازی کے قیادت میں عمران خان فری ریلی کا مناظر”
When translated into English, the caption is: “Scenes of Imran Khan free rally led by Ahmed Khan Niazi”.
The caption likely refers to Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s protests in Lahore on 5 August 2025.
PTI protests in August 2025
PTI supporters rallied in several cities to demand Imran Khan’s release earlier this month as August 2025 marks the second anniversary of Khan’s arrest. He was detained on various charges, which were dismissed by Khan as politically motivated and he has since denied any wrongdoing.
Authorities arrested hundreds of PTI supporters from rallies held across the country. A video shared by the party’s official X account (archive) showed the police dragging PTI leader Rehana Dar into the van. “An elder like Rehana Dar is being dragged by the shameless Punjab Police, a disgraceful sight. Maryam Nawaz and IG Punjab have sunk to a new low with this act,” said the post.
Fact or Fiction?
An analysis shows that the video purportedly showing PTI’s rally is likely AI-generated.
The person highlighted in the image below appears to transform, gaining three arms instead of two at timestamp 0:02. This is because AI usually struggles to create realistic hands and render them accurately in visual media.
A person with three hands.
Soch Fact Check also noticed that the Pakistani flags are not completely green and white, but appear to shift colours and briefly morph into some other flag, indicating the use of AI.
Flags are not entirely “Pakistani” ones, having green and white colours.
This video also showed another visual inconsistency with flags, which was pointed out in a report sent to Soch Fact Check by experts at Northwestern University.
“The opacity of the flags shifts, occasionally allowing for people to be seen ‘through’ the flags’ colors (e.g., 0:02),” according to a report by Marco Postiglione, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University, and V.S. Subramanian, a professor of computer science at the same university.
Image from Northwestern University’s report.
The analytical report from the Global Online Deepfake Detection System (GODDS) at Northwestern University added that the “video’s poor quality makes it difficult to evaluate distinguishing features of the media, such as faces or signage. Poor video quality can be used as a tactic to obscure video manipulations.”
Furthermore, a “Veo” watermark appears at the bottom right corner of the video, which “could indicate that the video has been AI-manipulated,” according to the same report. Veo is an AI-generation software by Google. It can use text and images as inputs to generate artificial videos.
The report also included an analysis by 22 deepfake detection algorithms.” 8 out of 22 predictive models said that the video is likely to be fake with a probability above 0.5”, which means that “precision of these models on the fake class ranges between 0.65 and 0.99, meaning we can be highly confident in their predictions.”
The remaining 14 predictive models assigned a probability below 0.5 for the video being fake, which means that they lean more towards the video being likely real. This report noted that these models have low precision for the real class, between 0.22 and 0.48, which suggests their predictions cannot be relied upon.
This analysis means that it’s highly probable that this video is AI-generated.
An image of the complete analysis can be given below:
The analytical report from the Global Online Deepfake Detection System (GODDS) at Northwestern University.
Since eight of the more reliable models assigned a higher probability, the GODDS report concluded that the content is likely fake and AI-generated. “We believe this video is likely generated via artificial intelligence,” the report said.
Therefore, based on our independent analysis and the results of the GODDS report, Soch Fact Check concludes the video is likely AI-generated.
Virality
The Facebook video garnered 641,000 views and was liked 6,800 times.
It also appeared on Facebook here, here, and here.
On Instagram here, here, and here.
It was shared on X here and here.
Some posts that appeared on 27 July 2025 claimed that this AI-generated video shows the PTI rally in Gujranwala in 2022.
Conclusion: The video allegedly showing a PTI rally in August 2025 was likely generated using artificial intelligence software.
Background image in cover photo: The Express Tribune
To appeal against our fact-check, please send an email to appeals@sochfactcheck.com