Footage from 2011 Japan tsunami falsely shared as flooding in China in 2024

Published on July 22, 2024 at 06:46
3 min read
By Ara Eugenio, AFP Philippines

Old footage of cars and port equipment being swept away during the 2011 tsunami in Japan has resurfaced in social media posts that falsely claimed it showed deadly floods in China. The clip, which has been viewed millions of times, was mirrored and its audio was replaced with a clip from a Philippine news report about the flooding in southern China in June 2024.

The footage was viewed more than three million times after it was shared on Facebook on July 10, 2024.

Its Tagalog-language voiceover says, "Some areas in southern China now look like the sea after experiencing widespread flooding and landslides."

Text overlaid on the clip -- which uses the Philippines' name for the South China Sea waters to its immediate west -- adds, "It has turned into the ‘West Philippine Sea’. Is this karma for China?"

Screenshot of the false Facebook post, captured on July 21, 2024

The clip surfaced as tensions over the hotly contested waterway soared following a series of escalating confrontations between Philippine and Chinese ships.

The most serious happened on June 17, when China Coast Guard personnel wielding knives, sticks and an axe surrounded and boarded three Philippine Navy boats during a resupply mission to Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratly Islands.

Southern China was also hit by torrential rains and deadly flooding in June, resulting in at least 38 deaths in densely populated Guangdong province, AFP reported.

China is enduring a summer of extreme weather, with heavy rains across the east and south coming as much of the north sweltered in successive heat waves.

The Asian giant is the world's leading emitter of the greenhouse gases that scientists say drive climate change and make extreme weather more likely.

The same footage and voiceover were also shared in other Facebook posts here and here, and on TikTok here and here.

But the clip does not show flooding in southern China.

Old tsunami clip

AFP previously debunked posts that falsely linked the clip to the 2024 New Year's Day earthquake in Japan.

The clip matches footage shown at the 2:15 mark of a YouTube video uploaded by the Japan News Network (JNN) on February 25, 2021 (archived link).

The version used in the false posts has been cropped and mirrored.

The caption of the YouTube video states it shows a port in Miyako City of Japan's Iwate prefecture on March 11, 2011, following a 9.0-magnitude undersea quake that struck northeastern Japan.

The tremor, the strongest in the country's history, triggered a tsunami and nuclear meltdown that ultimately left more than 18,500 people dead or missing.

Below is a screenshot comparison of the mirrored clip used in the false post (left) and the video uploaded by JNN (right), with similarities marked by AFP:

Screenshot comparison of the mirrored clip used in the false post (left) and the video uploaded by JNN (right)

The white building in the middle of the video corresponds to Google Street View imagery of a structure in the city (archived link).

Keyword searches found the voiceover used in the falsely shared clip was lifted from a news report about the floods in China, uploaded to YouTube by Philippine news organisation Bombo Radyo on June 26, 2024 (archived link).

The report is titled, "Widespread floods continue to wreak havoc in Southern China | Bombo Radyo".

The JNN footage is not shown anywhere in the report.

AFP has debunked other misleading claims about the floods in China here.

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