A newspaper advertisement on a gathering of Indian boarding schools ran the image of the Bellevue Palace, the German president's residence, as a boarding school in India.
BOOM confirmed that the ad was indeed published on the second page of Hindustan Times' Delhi City edition on October 1, 2023. However we were unable to find it in other major newspapers.
Philipp Ackermann, the German Ambassador to India, fact-checked the ad on X (formerly Twitter), and clarified that the building seen in the ad "is no boarding school". "It is the seat of the German President in Berlin. Our Rashtrapati Bhavan as it were," he added.
The ad, published by the Afairs Education Group, invites parents to a "Mega Gathering of India's Leading Boarding Schools", but contained an image of the Bellevue Place, instead of an actual boarding school in India.
The Bellevue Palace is an 18th-century palace located in Germany, which has served as the official residence of the German president since 1994.
This was pointed out by Ackermann, who added with snark, "There are good boarding schools also in Germany - but here, no child will be admitted 😎."
We looked through the responses to the German Ambassador's tweet, and found a user sharing an image of a newspaper carrying the ad. Portions of the front page of the newspaper visible in the photo indicated that it was a print copy of the Hindustan Times.
BOOM accessed the e-paper version of Hindustan Times', and found the misleading ad on the second page of the "Delhi City" edition.
We compared the image used in the ad to the image of the Bellevue Place on Berlin city's official website, and found it to be an exact match.
We reached out to Afairs Education Group for a comment, but were unable to get a response.
The misleading use of the Bellevue Palace in the ad was trolled by many other users in response to Ackermann's tweet.