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
Wreck of Malaysian Airlines MH370 Found
Fact
A news report video about the disappeared Malaysian Airlines plane and unrelated footage of sunken aircraft are edited
A video claiming that Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, which had mysteriously disappeared in March 2014, has been found without any trace of a skeleton is going viral on TikTok. Newschecker found the claim to be misleading.
TikTok user @e_daniel_o posted a video showing a new clip about the mysterious disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. The clip follows footage of an underwater wreck of a plane accompanied by a melancholic tune. Text superimposed on the video reads, “Missing flight MH370 has been found after years without any skeleton.” The archived version of the TikTok video can be seen here.
The video posted on April 29 has garnered 134.6k likes, 7775 users have shared it and 1701 people have commented until the last count.
A Malaysia Airlines passenger jet MH370 with 239 people on board had disappeared during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. Nine years on, the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines flight, a Boeing 777 jet designated MH370, still remains a mystery.
Fact Check /Verification
To check the authenticity of the claim made in the viral video, Newschecker closely analysed the video and found that the first part of the news clip had a text scroll on the bottom of the screen. The text reads, “New look at mystery of flight MH370. NBC News.” Taking it as a clue, we ran a keyword search on YouTube which led us to a video report published on the channel named Today. The narration and the visuals of the NBC News video exactly matched the first 11-second of the viral video. We found that the video report was about the three-part Netflix docuseries “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared.” However, the report didn’t mention that the disappeared Malaysian Airlines plane had been found. Rather, the video report said how the docuseries explored the many theories surrounding the missing aircraft.
Further, we took several keyframes from the second part of the viral video and conducted reverse searches on them. The search led us to a short YouTube video published on the YouTube channel named Ak Studio07. The video footage exactly matched the second part of the viral video from 12 second onwards. On reading the video caption, we found that the video showed the Tristar aeroplane wreck.
Further, we conducted a search on Google by using the keyword ‘Tristar airplane wreck’ and found several reports about how the abandoned aeroplane has encouraged dive tourism and coral growth. On digging further, we found an article on Suba Diving. The article mentioned that an aircraft parked at King Hussein International Airport near the Red Sea later sank in Jordan’s Gulf of Aqaba.
Our findings clearly indicated that the viral video is edited by using different clips from unrelated incidents to make the false claims.
Conclusion
The viral video claiming that the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 that went missing in March 2014 has been found without any trace of human skeleton is misleading. The viral video shows a news report about Netflix docuseries on the Malaysian aircraft and a sunken aircraft in Jordan’s Gulf of Aqaba.
Result: Edited Video
Sources
Today /YouTube, 9 March, 2023
AK Studio07, 28 April, 2023
Scuba Diving, 12 August, 2022
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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.
