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Of course you can fake a small/large crowd in a protest.

From the top of my head I can think of news reporting both "few (tens of) thousands" vs "hundreds of thousands" (different news reporting different numbers/estimates/etc) in 2025 protests in Serbia/Belgrade, as well as those comparisons of Obama vs Trump inauguration news/photos.

Meanwhile to you as an individual there on the spot - both crowds of say 50K-100K and 1M+ look basically the same = "huge amounts of people in every direction that you look".

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Counting large crowds is hard, but the tools continue to improve: we have increasingly advanced drone photography and access to better AI tools to generate more reliable estimates.

If crowd sizes become a significant point of contention it'll become increasingly commonplace for multiple parties to take lots of aerial video and photos that serve as independent verification. You could probably get a pretty accurate estimate of how many people show up to an event by sending drones to take photos every 15 minutes.

In any case, I think the problem you highlight is more focused towards the upper-end, while I was thinking about the lower end of the spectrum. Where some people might be very vocal online, but they're unable to gather more than a dozen or two people for any given protest. If a protest is gathering an unknown number of people that ranges between 100k and 1 million that sounds like a really good problem to have.

Your criticism of inconsistent people estimates are valid, I'm not sure if newspapers have published the set of tools and criteria that they use when generating these estimates, so that's an area where it would be great to see increased transparency.

While 100K itself is indeed impressive - the order of magnitude difference between 100K and 1M makes a lot of room for interpretations, rationalizations, spins ...etc.

The "publishing the set of tools and criteria used to generate estimates" is happening, and so far it seems that usually doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter because of course those sources/news that report wildly wrong (be it larger or smaller numbers) are usually (not always, but very commonly) controlled by the governments.

So despite students that organized the biggest protests in Belgrade giving their estimates (based on combo of RSVP and how many people accommodated people from other cities). And those being close to independant research (using drone footage, VR/AR crowd simulations, AI) with loads of posts/videos providing detailed explanations ...

Most "ordinary people" saw (and keep seeing) just the "official version".

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