Recently social media has been flooded with posts claiming that NEC Liberia was “hanging a banner belonging to CDC”. These posts carried the same photo of a vehicle parked by the roadside with a writing GSA-NEC-05-18.
One of these post was made in a Facebook group called The Darius Dillon Center for the Exchange of Intellectual Opinions, the poster named J Carsual S Tokaph posted: “Breaking News! NEC car was captured with Cdcians who went to put George Weah Banner’s up!”
In the photo, a man is seen on ladder trying to either put-up or pull down a banner. The banner in the photo is not clear to determine the image on the banner. However, in the same photo there’s a visible campaign banner of the CDC with image of President George Weah and Vice President Jewel Howard Taylor.
How Did LVL Fact Check the Photo?
We began verifying the claim by first conducting a thorough analysis of the photo. First, the post claims that the men putting up the banner were CdCians, but there’s nothing in the photo that shows neither the man on the ladder nor the ones standing by the roadside were working together. Also, there’s no connection between the man on the ladder and the parked NEC vehicle. There is also no proof that the banner being put-up belongs to the CDC.
Also, multiple reverse image search of the photo show noting much other the same Facebook posts making the claim of “NEC hanging CDC banner”.
The cause of this could be that the photo has not been online longer than the many times it surfaced in these Facebook posts making the claim.
We also sought to find more details about the photo by checking the EXIF Data of the photo to know the geolocation, the camera and the time the photo was taken, but nothing about the photo was visible except the resolution of the photo.
The National Elections Commission also did a Facebook post to clarify that its “internal review shows that no person in the depicted photo is associated with the Commission”.
Conclusion
Based on the results of our verification process of the photo which many Facebook users have claimed is a photo of NEC hanging a banner of one of the political parties contesting the 2023 General Elections, we conclude that there no evidence to prove that NEC Liberia was hanging a banner of the ruling CDC.