Denmark’s king, Frederik X, traveled to Stolkholm on May 6 for his first official trip abroad, but he wasn’t filmed waving a Palestinian flag from a balcony in a city about 600 kilometers southeast several days later.
A video posted May 12 on Instagram identifies the flagbearer as the Danish monarch, however.
“The king of Denmark waved the Palestinian flag from the balcony in support of Palestine,” reads text over a video of a man waving a Palestinian flag from a balcony.
An Instagram post sharing the video was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
The man on the balcony is not and does not resemble King Frederik, Denmark’s king.
A reverse-image search of a screenshot from the video led us to a May 12 X post that falsely described the video as showing King Frederik waving the flag “from a balcony as he greets hundreds of protesters demonstrating in Copenhagen in solidarity with the people of Palestine.”
Links attached to the X post flagging it as misinformation include a Wikipedia page for a former girls school in Malmo. We found the address for the building and looked at it on Google Street View. Rounding the corner, we discovered the building in the video.
Another X user said in a May 12 post that the man on the balcony was “with his kid when our demonstration in Malmo passed his flat this week. Disinformation is not helpful for the cause. It was super cute though, the kid blew bubbles!”
On May 9, pro-Palestinian protesters gathered in Malmo to decry Israel’s inclusion in the Eurovision Song Contest.
We rate claims this video shows the king of Denmark waving a Palestinian flag Pants on Fire!