Pages on social media circulated a video clip that publishers claimed was recent, showing Syrian actress Amal Arafa responding to threats against her, in which she said: "I am in Damascus, and whoever wants to settle a score is welcome".
The fact-checking team followed up on the report and carried out a digital trace of the circulated clip, splitting the video into still frames and running reverse image searches to verify their origin and publication date. The verification showed the frames matched a clip Amal Arafa had previously published on her official Instagram account on 09/12/2024.
This comes against the backdrop of the controversy raised in 2019 by a scene in the series "Contact", in which Amal Arafa appeared in a satirical sketch about the victims of chemical weapons attacks in Syria and presented an account claiming the victims' scenes had been fabricated, which prompted a wave of wide criticism at the time, before Arafa apologised for the scene.
Why is this claim misleading?
Out of temporal context: a clip published by Amal Arafa on her official account on 09/12/2024 was recirculated and presented as a recent response to threats against her, stripping it of its original time frame.
