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  • 2018-10-26 (xsd:date)
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  • Does This Photograph Show 66,000 People Outside a Trump Rally? (en)
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  • On 23 October 2018, an image purportedly showing a crowd of 66,000 people cheering outside of a rally for President Trump started making its way around the internet: Whoever created this meme did not bother to mention which rally this image supposedly represented (President Trump appeared more than a dozen such events in October 2018 alone), but we can reasonably assume that this graphic is referring to a rally that took place in Houston. For one, this meme was first posted the morning after the Houston rally on 22 October 2018. And second, the 17,000 figure roughly matches the capacity for the Toyota Center in that city where the rally was held. The meme also mirrored comments made by right-wing radio personality Rush Limbaugh, who claimed that anywhere between 75,000 and 100,000 people had showed up to the venue: This image, however, was not taken outside of the Toyota Center in Houston, nor does it show a crowd of 66,000 people. For one thing, the Toyota Center is located in the center of downtown Houston, where the surrounding landscape consists of tall buildings, not mountains: Moreover, the numbers cited in this meme (and by Rush Limbaugh) also don't line up with reality. We investigated a similar rumor after an aerial photograph of the Cleveland Cavaliers 2016 NBA Championship was shared as if it pictured a crowd of Trump supporters (which was likely an attempt to support Trump's own false claim that 50,000 people were waiting outside) and found that Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo had a slightly different estimate of the size of the crowd waiting outside: We aren't exactly sure where the photograph at the center of this meme was taken. President Trump has held nearly 30 rallies in 2018, a dozen of which took place in October. The landscape in this photograph appears to match the scene at Trump's rally in Missoula, Montana, on 18 October 2018: The attendance in Missoula was also well under the estimate provided by this meme, estimated by law enforcement officers to be about 8,000 people. Crowd estimates are not an exact science, but we can provide a comparison to demonstrate the difference between the number of people pictured in this viral image and the number of people this meme claims to show. The following picture shows a near capacity crowd at the Milton Keynes Bowl, an outdoor concert venue in England, which has a capacity of about 65,000 people: (en)
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