Fact Check: Photo Of Huge Crowd Is NOT Of A Trump Rally

Fact Check

  • by: Victoria Eavis

STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

Fact Check: Photo Of Huge Crowd Is NOT Of A Trump Rally Not a Rally

Is this a photo of an October 16, 2020 rally for President Donald Trump's re-election campaign in Ocala, Florida? No, that's not true: It's a photo of crowds on a bridge at a 2019 music festival in Switzerland called Street Parade. The Trump rally was conducted at an airport.

The claim appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) where it was published on October 16, 2020. The caption read:

Ocala... Trump rally!!!!

This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:

Facebook screenshot

(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Sat Oct 17 13:32:15 2020 UTC)

Although the crowd at the Ocala rally was in the thousands, the landscape and crowd size shown in actual photos and footage of the rally are noticeably different from the photo that the Facebook user is falsely claiming is of Trump's rally. Trump's rally was held at an airport, whereas the music festival took place around Lake Zurich.

The following photos from the Street Parade event website show multiple birds-eye views of the 2019 festival underway, revealing the bridge scene lifted for use in the fake post about Trump's Ocala event:

ADI_3197.jpg.1200x1200_q85.jpgADI_3172.jpg.1200x1200_q85.jpgADI_3252.jpg.1200x1200_q85.jpgADI_3216.jpg.1200x1200_q85.jpg

The following are photos and videos from the Trump campaign rally in Ocala, Florida on October 16, 2020:

The Australian Associated Press debunked a similar claim about the same photo here.

Updates:

  • 2020-10-17T21:18:46Z 2020-10-17T21:18:46Z
    Updated to change paragraph order.

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  Victoria Eavis

Victoria Eavis is a fact checker at Lead Stories. She recently graduated from Duke University with a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology. In her last few months at Duke, she was a reporter for a student news site, The 9th Street Journal, that covers the city of Durham, North Carolina. 

Read more about or contact Victoria Eavis

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