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| - Fact Check: Canada DIDN'T shame Indians for open defecation, these ads are Photoshopped
India Today Fact Check found that the picture has been digitally altered. It has nothing to do with Indians living in Canada. The actual image is old and from Accra, Ghana.
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India Today Fact Check
The picture has been digitally altered. It has nothing to do with Indians living in Canada. The actual image of the billboard is old and from Accra, Ghana.
A billboard featuring a man defecating in the open is making rounds, with many claiming that Canadian municipalities have issued these ads in Hindi for Indians living there.
Sharing this photo, an X user wrote, “Municipalities across Canadian cities with high Indian population have put posters in Hindi across the park and beaches asking Indians not to defecate in the open. It is normal in India as Millions of them still don’t have the facility of a washroom and they defecate in the open.” Its archive can be seen here.
India Today Fact Check found that the picture has been digitally altered. It has nothing to do with Indians living in Canada. The actual ad is old and from Accra, Ghana.
OUR PROBE
We performed a reverse search on the viral photo and it led us to the stock image website Shutterstock where a photo resembling the viral one can be seen. We compared both photos and found several similarities. As per Shutterstock, the photo was taken on May 1, 2018. The photo was captioned: “The billboard “Beaches are not toilets” on the street of Accra.”
However, the only differences we found between the Shutterstock photo and the viral one were that the face of the man defecating appeared to have been digitally altered, and the text “Gyae Ennfatawo” was replaced with the Hindi translation of “stop open defecation”.
We also found many media reports published in 2018 that contained the Shutterstock image. As per BusinessGhana, these billboards were part of a public health sanitation project funded by Canada and the United Nations. On the billboard, a logo of the Government of Canada can be seen at the bottom alongside the logos of the Ghanaian government and UNICEF. Canada has been working with UNICEF since 2012 to eradicate open defecation in the African country.
The reports mentioned that the Canadian Government gave about $850,000 to fund one of Ghana’s most “significant” development challenges. An official said at the time that the money had been instrumental in getting Ghanaians to change habits and build proper toilets.
We then searched if Canadian municipalities had employed similar ad campaigns to encourage Indians not to defecate in the open. We found no credible news report about this.
Thus, it is more than clear that a billboard of an open defecation campaign in Accra, Ghana, was digitally altered to falsely link to Indians living in Canada.
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