Video of forced marriage of Hindu woman is staged
A video recently posted on X claims that a 20-year-old Hindu woman in Bangladesh was forcibly married to a 65-year-old Muslim elder. However, Dismislab’s fact-check has found that the circulating video is part of staged content. The video was posted on September 9 of this year from a Facebook page named “Wedding Studio.” Multiple such staged videos of forced marriages are regularly posted on that page as content.
The video was posted on October 3 from an X account named “News Matrix.” The 17-second video shows a woman being taken away in a car with an elderly man. Both of them are dressed in wedding attire. The girl is not willing to go with the man. She was crying to get out of the car and was seeking help from a woman nearby. Translating the language of the post, it reads: “🚨 PLEASE SAVE ME! A 20 YEAR OLD GIRL’S CRY FOR HELP A 20 year old Hindu girl in Bangladesh was forced into marriage with a 65 year old Muslim man. As she was reportedly being taken away, she cried and begged people to save her life,” (verbatim).
The same video was also posted on October 2 from another account named “Bangladeshi Hindu Community.” The video’s description reads, “In Bangladesh, a 20-year-old Young girl was forcibly married to a 65-year-old Muslim man…🇧🇩🚨When they tried to take the girl away, she cried and begged them to save her life…”
As of the publication of this report, the video had been viewed more than 149,000 times and reposted 979 times. More than one and a half thousand users had reacted to the post.
In the course of the investigation, a reverse image search using keyframes from the video led Dismislab to a video posted on September 9 from a Facebook page named “Wedding Studio.” The post read, “How the bride’s farewell happens when there is no father or mother 🥲.” The post’s description used the hashtag “reelsvideo.” This 30-second video was found to be an exact match with the video circulated under the claim of a forced marriage.
For further detailed verification, Dismislab reviewed the page. The page identifies itself as a reel creator and regularly publishes staged content involving storylines such as forced marriages. Upon reviewing the page, multiple videos with similar storylines involving different individuals were found. Content for an entire wedding video is created and then posted sequentially as smaller videos.
In other words, the video claiming that a 20-year-old Hindu woman in Bangladesh was forcibly married to a 65-year-old Muslim man is not footage of a real event. Essentially, staged content is being presented as an incident of forced marriage and used to incite communal tensions.
Previously, Dismislab published a detailed report on an earlier instance in which a clip from a forced-marriage drama published from this same “Wedding Studio” page was used to spread Bangladesh-based disinformation worldwide.
