A digitally altered video is shared as visuals of school children identifying Zelensky as Hitler in a TV quiz.
A social media post claims that children in a TV quiz show identified Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as Adolf Hitler while answering a question. This post also contains a link to a video posted on ‘X’ by a user named Aussie Cossack, in which we can see the children looking at the photo of Zelenskyy and identifying him as Adolf Hitler. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: This video shows school children identifying the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as Adolf Hitler in a TV quiz show.
Fact: This is an edited video. In the original video, which is an episode of the Jamaican TV show Junior Schools Challenge Quiz, the person who appears on the screen is Hollywood actor Jason Statham, not Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a reverse image search on a few keyframes from the viral video. This search led us to the original full-length version of the viral video uploaded on 18 October 2017 on YouTube by ‘Television Jamaica.’
This is an episode of the TV quiz show named Junior Schools Challenge Quiz. The portion seen in the viral video can be seen from the 2:42 second mark in the original video.
In the original video, the producers of the quiz show display the photo of Hollywood actor Jason Statham. This makes it clear that his photo was digitally edited and swapped with that of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
To sum up, an edited video is being falsely shared as a real video of school children in a TV quiz show identifying Volodymyr Zelenskyy as Adolf Hitler.