Conspiracy theories have a field day following the unseemly political developments in the US. On Sunday, many social media users talked about a blackout in Vatican City, following a live stream by the YouTube channel Vatican News. While there was no official confirmation about the blackout in Vatican City, some social media users had bizarre assumptions over the power outage.
Vatican Blackout
As some of the Twitter users pointed out technical issues behind the incident, there were some conspiracy theorists who linked the Vatican blackout with the unproven and outlandish charge of Italy's involvement in the US presidential election 2020.
A Twitter user, @Remaining33, who has over 12,6000 followers on the platform, said in a post, "Vatican in blackout after leaked statement on Italians' involvement in US elections. Coincidence?"
Another Twitter user shared a video that showed major road blocks in some Roman streets.
One of the users shared some screenshots to establish his claims. One of those images included a document, which begins with, "I Prof Alfio D'Urso, Advocate/Lawyer, of Via Vittorio Emanuele, Catania, 95131 Italy, do hereby provide the following affidavit of facts in several meetings with a high-level army security service official."
It included that Arturo D'Elia, a former head of the IT Department of Leonardo SpA, was charged by the public prosecutor of Naples for technology/ data manipulation and implantation of computer viruses in the main computers of the Italy-based company in December 2020.
"D'Elia has been deposed by the presiding judge in Naples and in sworn testimony states on November 4, 2020, under instruction and direction of US persons working from the US Embassy in Rome, undertook the operation to switch data from the US elections of November 3, 2020, from significant margin of victory for Donald Trump to Joe Biden in a number of states where Joe Biden was losing the vote totals," added the document.
However, the authenticity of this document is still unknown. It is possible that it was completely fake or some parts of it were doctored.
However, since there has been no official statement about the blackout in Vatican City, some people have taken advantage of the situation to spread conspiracy theories. According to some reports, there was no blackout at all. Apparently, the darkness appeared in the video because the live stream camera's auto-exposure.
But Vatican City was not the only place that was reported to be hit by a blackout. On early Sunday, many big cities in Pakistan including Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore faced complete darkness. According to reports, the country's Guddu power plant developed a fault which caused high transmission lines to trip.
A Twitter user wrote: "Hours long very unusual power outage in Pakistan's large cities as well as in the Vatican in Rome Italy."
Another user posted: "So the entire country of Pakistan is in a power blackout. The Vatican is in a power blackout. I read – have not confirmed – that Pakistan was in league with Italy for election interference. If true – methinks something of a Military nature is underfoot."
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