Sanjeeb Phuyal is the Nepali Editor of Newschecker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. He brings over a decade of experience writing and editing news. In his previous stint, he worked as online editor for The Kathmandu Post. With the growth of social media platforms—and the ever-growing competition amongst media outlets to churn out breaking news, he feels that fact-checking every piece of information has become more essential today than ever before.
Claim
Video shows a massive landslide hitting Sikkim state of India.
Fact
Viral clip from July 2021 actually shows flash floods sweeping through Japanese town Atami.
A video purportedly showing a devastating flash flood sweeping through a town in Sikkim state of India is going viral on TikTok.
TikTok user @dilvakta_maharjan posted a video showing a massive landslide sweeping through an urban area. Text superimposed on the video reads, “A melancholic scene of the devastation caused by flash floods in Sikkim. May the 33 Koti Devata (33 types of God) save those affected.”
The video posted on October 6 has garnered 6315 likes and 184 users have shared it until the time of publishing this article. The archived version of the TikTok video can be seen here.
Newschecker found the claim to be misleading.
Fact Check /Verification
To check the veracity of the claim made in the viral video, Newschecker took several keyframes from the viral video and conducted reverse searches on them. The results pointed us towards the devastating flash floods that swept through Japan’s central city of Atami in Shizuoka.
On checking a video, dated July 3 2021, published on the YouTube channel named Today, we found that a video report carried the footage whose frames from 0.5 seconds to 0.20 seconds exactly matched the viral video. The video report confirmed that a massive landslide triggered by torrential rain hit south west of Tokyo in July 2021.
We also checked an article, dated July 3, 2021, published on Aljazeera online about the landslides hitting Atami city in Shizuoka of Japan. The image carried in the article exactly matched the viral video.
Further, we found another video, whose frames exactly matched the viral video, published on the YouTube channel of Hindustan Times. The video dated July 5, 2021 reported that the video showed a massive landslide ripping through a Japanese seaside resort town on July 3.
Thus our findings clearly show that an old video of a landslide in Japan is falsely shared as a clip showing a flash flood in Sikkim state of India.
Conclusion
The video allegedly showing a flash flood sweeping through Sikkim state of India is misleading. The viral video is from July 2021 and it actually shows a massive landslide hitting Atami city in Shizuoka of Japan.
Result: False
Sources
Today /YouTube, July 3, 2021
Aljazeera, July 3, 2021
Hindustan Times/YouTube July 3, 2021
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Sanjeeb Phuyal is the Nepali Editor of Newschecker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. He brings over a decade of experience writing and editing news. In his previous stint, he worked as online editor for The Kathmandu Post. With the growth of social media platforms—and the ever-growing competition amongst media outlets to churn out breaking news, he feels that fact-checking every piece of information has become more essential today than ever before.
