Pages and accounts on social media circulated a video, which its publishers claimed was recent, showing Syrians expressing nostalgia for the era of the Bashar al-Assad regime because of the economic crisis and the high cost of living.
The Kashaf team broke the clip into still frames and ran a reverse image search using Google Lens, in addition to analyzing the visual details and matching the context against open sources, and found that the video is not recent. It was first published on 17 April 2026 and shows scenes from the Law and Dignity sit-in held in the city of Damascus, and it is unrelated to any new events as the publishers of the claim alleged.
Why is this claim misleading?
Out of temporal context: An old clip was recirculated out of its original time frame and attached to claims suggesting it documents recent developments, in order to imply a current wave of discontent linking living conditions to nostalgia for the former regime.
