After large crowds turned out Oct. 18 for “No Kings” rallies across the U.S., some conservative politicians and social media accounts sought to undermine the crowd counts.

One X account posted, “Analysts are calling this the biggest FRAUD in American history. MSNBC falsely aired a Video from 2017 claiming it was LIVE footage from yesterday’s ‘No Kings’ rally in Boston. MSNBC purposely wanted to portray a massive turnout for ‘No Kings.’ Which was a LIE.” Other X accounts posted similar claims.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, reshared a post by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., that included the MSNBC footage.

“Why are Dems dishonestly sending around a video from 2017, claiming it was this past weekend?” Cruz wrote. After this story was published, the X post was no longer available on Cruz’s account.

The footage MSNBC aired is real and depicted Boston’s Oct. 18 “No Kings” rally. The views of the protest that MSNBC aired were similar to others that aired Oct. 18 by four Boston-area television stations.

Cruz’s office did not respond by publication time to an inquiry.

How large were the “No Kings” rally crowds?

Organizers of the “No Kings” rallies — dozens of liberal groups, including environmental organizations and labor unions — estimate that up to 7 million people attended protests nationally, including 125,000 people at the rally at Boston Common, a large public park. 

That would make Boston’s rally the nation’s fourth largest of the day, behind New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., according to nationally crowdsourced estimates compiled by G. Elliott Morris, the former editor of FiveThirtyEight.com who now runs a Substack on political data. Morris’ median national estimate for rally attendees was between 5.2 million and 8.2 million people. 

The 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C., was estimated to include 470,000 people, according to academic estimates reported by The New York Times.

Crowd counts were scrutinized in 2017 after Trump said counts comparing attendees at the Women’s March with his inauguration undercounted the inauguration crowd. He falsely accused the media of lying about his inauguration crowd.

MSNBC did not respond to an inquiry for this article. Using the television monitoring service TVEyes, we confirmed that the MSNBC footage aired Oct. 18 around 11:35 a.m. Eastern Time.