Unevidenced tweet about People’s Vote crowd size spreads to Facebook
What was claimed
According to German TV, there were 2.2 million at the People’s Vote march in London on Saturday 19 October.
Our verdict
We’ve seen no evidence any German TV station said this. Best estimates suggest the number was in the low hundreds of thousands. Two million is an implausible estimate.
At least three Facebook posts have shared a link to a tweet which claims that, according to German TV, there were 2.2 million at the People’s Vote march in London on Saturday 19 October. The original tweet has been shared over 4,000 times.
German TV put the #PeoplesVoteMarch at 2.2 million, according to a German methodology for estimating crowdspic.twitter.com/l81mRx9kq3
— Mike Butcher (BlueSky/Threads: @mikebutcher) (@mikebutcher) October 20, 2019
The tweet is incorrect. We’ve found no evidence that German TV reported a figure of 2.2 million people at the march, and the claim seems to originate from an anonymous twitter account.
Most of the coverage that we’ve seen from German media, both broadcast and online, reported a number in the tens or hundreds of thousands. A couple of German news websites also quoted the organisers’ estimate of one million people.
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We also spoke to experts in crowd science at the Manchester Metropolitan University. They told us that a total crowd of two million people was implausible. Their estimates found that the number was most likely in the low hundreds of thousands, and certainly not in the millions. You can read more about those estimates here.
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 false because there is no evidence German TV made an estimate of 2.2 million, and crowd scientists say it’s implausible that the crowd was that large.
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