Old Clip of Tractor Sale Shared as One of ‘Hiring People’ for Farmers’ Protest

A video showing a group of men wearing turbans getting into a verbal spat, with one man physically restraining another one, is going viral on social media.

The claim: The video is being shared to claim that it shows visuals from the ongoing farmers' protests around Delhi, adding that it shows "deal to be part of farmers protest."

• The posts claim that the current rate for hiring a protester is ₹35,000, however, the man in the video was manhandled because he demanded ₹40,000.

The Quint received multiple queries for this video's verification on its WhatsApp tipline.

(Archives of more posts sharing this claim can be seen here, here, and here.)

Is it true?: No. The video predates the ongoing farmers' protests and shows a deal being made for selling a tractor in Barnala, Punjab.

How did we find out the truth?: Using InVID, a video verification extension for Google Chrome, we divided the viral video into keyframes and ran a reverse image search.

• This took us to a YouTube video, published on 17 February, which was titled "Innocent Punjabi || Funny tractor sale deal !! (sic)."

• Another result showed us an Instagram post dated 17 January 2024, which was shared with a caption in Punjabi.

• The caption loosely translates to "Who saw the atmosphere at the market yesterday?"

Taking cues from this, we looked up 'Tractor market deal' using Punjabi keywords across social media platforms.

• One of the searches on Facebook led us to the same video by a page called 'Jatt Zimidar Vlog', where the same video was shared on 16 January 2024, captioned "see how the deal of tractor is being done."

• We reached out to the admin of the page, who confirmed that the video had no connection to the farmers' protest.

• "It has nothing to do with the farmers' protest. This is a video of a tractor sale," they said, adding that the video was taken in Barnala, a city in Punjab.

Conclusion: An old video of a deal being made to sell a tractor in Barnala, Punjab is being falsely linked to the ongoing farmers' protests around Delhi.

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