American journalist Johnny Harris tells about the border situation between Finland and Russia in a video. Harris published the video to his multi-million audience on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
The video features familiar news images from the Finnish border: snow, willing border crossers and bicycles.
However, not everything is right in Harris’ video.
The pictures briefly show a snow-free country and riot police in white helmets. In another special scene, a large group of people are sitting on the ground behind a barbed wire fence. There is no snow.
– The migrants just sit there without being able to leave these terrible conditions, Harris describes the situation.
Below is an excerpt from Harris’ video:
found out that the policemen appearing in the video are actually from the Polish border. The time is the end of 2021, when Belarus directed thousands of people to the Polish border.
There are several news photos and videos of the same situation.
For example, the Polish Ministry of Defense published a video from the same location on November 14, 2021 on its messaging service X (formerly Twitter).
The video shows police officers in white helmets. The trees on the left side of the picture are also the same as in the video used by Harris.
Harris also used another short video clip in his article, which is not from Finland.
The video shows a large group of people on the ground. A snow-free landscape can be glimpsed in the background. The samples are from the border of Belarus and Poland from the same period.
found other pictures of the same situation, in which, for example, a man in a green coat holding a small child can be seen. In Harris’s video below, the same man can be seen circled.
Harris posted a corrected version of the video
Johnny Harris is a well-known journalist. In addition to YouTube, he publishes his videos on, for example, Instagram and Tiktok.
He has almost five million followers on YouTube alone.
Harris says that he makes videos that help to understand the world. In recent videos, in addition to the border situation in Finland, he discusses, for example, the global economy and the border dispute between Venezuela and Guyana.
asked Harris for an explanation of the incorrect video clips.
Harris’ representative replied that the video in question was pulled from the internet and replaced with a real image from the Finnish border.
– We are adding measures to our processes to ensure that this does not happen again, representative Marc Paskin wrote to by email.
In the introduction of the corrected video on Instagram and TikTok, it is said that the previous version had a picture of the border between Poland and Belarus. “This version has been updated and has a real picture of the Finnish border,” the post reads.