What was claimed
A video shows the Green Party celebrating an election win in a foreign language.
Our verdict
False. This video was posted before the election. It is a Bengali language campaign video posted by the Green Party candidate for the Mayor of Newham, Areeq Chowdhury, who also posted videos in English, Urdu and Romanian. Mr Chowdhury did not win the election.
A Bengali-language campaign video posted by the Green Party’s Newham mayoral candidate, Areeq Chowdhury, has been shared online with false claims it shows the Greens celebrating an election win.
Posts shared thousands of times across X, Instagram and Facebook include captions such as “You’re going to want the sound on for this video of the Green Party celebrating their election victory” and “The Green Party celebrating their council election win in a foreign language”.
An article on the Express website headlined “Newly elected Green Party councillors announce victory without speaking English” also appeared to reference the video (although it did not link to it). After we contacted the Express it amended the article to instead reference an “earlier campaign speech in Bengali”.
Mr Chowdhury first posted the Bengali language video on 20 April encouraging people to vote Green in the local elections. He posted similar videos with the same group of people wearing the same outfits in other languages in the run up to the election on 7 May including English, Urdu and Romanian.
The viral clip was taken from a GB News segment broadcast in the early hours of 8 May as the election results were beginning to come in, as part of a discussion on sectarian politics.
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However another clip, posted by the channel on X later that day, showed a presenter introducing the same video from Mr Chowdhury as “a clip from one of the electoral announcements this morning”. We have contacted GB News about this and will update this article if we receive a response.
In any case, Mr Chowdhury did not win the Newham mayoral election, and has retired as a councillor.
In a statement posted on X he said: “This was not an election night victory announcement. This was a campaign video, from weeks ago, encouraging people to vote Green. The message was recorded in different languages including Bangla, Urdu and Romanian.”
He also told Full Fact that “the vast majority of my campaign videos were in fluent English (my native language)”.
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This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as partly false because this campaign video was posted before the election, which Mr Chowdhury did not win.
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