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.
With the monsoon rains lashing across the country, many images and videos showing rain-induced disasters are being shared online. In this context, a video purporting to show images which captured the devastation caused by flooding in Tinahu River in Butwal, is going viral on TikTok. Newschecker found that the images were old and unrelated.
TikTok User @sagar5.8 posted a video, showing a series of images of flooding rivers and inundated settlements. Audio accompanying the video claims, “The Tinahu River of Butwal has burst its banks, people have come from far to see the disaster, see all the houses and the squatters’ settlement across the river have been submerged.”
The video posted on June 28 has garnered 29.2k likes and 299 users have shared it until the last count.
Fact Check /Verification
To check the authenticity of the claim made by the viral video, Newschecker took keyframes of the photographs used in the video and conducted a reverse image search on google for each image.
The reverse image search on the first image threw up several results. One of the news reports published on Times Now Digital exactly matched the first image seen in the viral video. On checking the report, we found that the image showed the flood-ravaged Melamchi town of Sindhupalchok district when it was hit by a flood in June 2021.
Further, we conducted a reverse image search for the second image that showed a woman cooking food for her children on a makeshift boat while stuck in a flooded area. The search gave several results hinting that the photo showed the flood situation in Northwest India.
We found that the image had become viral in social media in 2019 and was used by several major news media on their reports about the severe floods that hit North West India that year.
On digging further, we came across a PDF file of an emergency action plan published by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), a humanitarian organisation. The report revealed that the photo showed the flood situation in Bangladesh’s Kurigram when it was hit by the disaster in July 2016, and it has been given to RDRS, a social organisation in Bangladesh.
Besides, we also found the photo in image sharing platform pinterest.com which credited the shot to photographer Shamsul Haque Suza.
On investigating more about the third image in the viral video, the reverse image search led us to a news report, published by The India Express in 2016. The photo, exactly matching the one displayed in the video, reads, “Villagers wade through the flooded Burdwan-Katwa road at Norjai Setu in Burdwan district of West Bengal.”
Our findings make it clear that three of the five photos shown in the viral video were old and from India and Bangladesh. But we couldn’t establish where and when two of the shots were taken.
Conclusion
The viral video claiming to show the effects of floods in Tinahun River in Butwal are false and images shown in the videos are old and unrelated.
Result: False Context /False
Sources
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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.
