Clip analysing doctored videos misrepresented as real footage of Buddha statue on flooded street
- Published on December 16, 2024 at 03:34
- 4 min read
- By SHIM Kyu-Seok, AFP South Korea
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The video, which appears to show a giant Buddha statue floating down a flooded street, was shared on Facebook on August 27, 2024.
An old Korean adage -- "If he doesn't like the monastery, a monk must leave" -- is superimposed above the clip.
It surfaced after parts of the Korean peninsula were battered by record torrential rainfall in July 2024, which the country's weather agency said is typically seen just once every 200 years (archived link).
Some rivers overflowed and roads were flooded by heavy rain, images on South Korean broadcasters showed, with people seen wading through waist-deep water in some areas.
The rainfall led to four deaths, the interior ministry said. The country is regularly hit by flooding during the summer monsoon period, but is typically well-prepared and the death toll is usually relatively low.
North Korea, meanwhile, was believed to have suffered "heavy casualties" from the downpours, with some media estimates of casualties ranging up to 1,500 dead (archived link).
Similar claims were shared on TikTok here, here and here in Korean, and it was also widely shared in Chinese, Turkish and Japanese.
Comments left by several users indicated they believed the video was genuine.
"This must have been a huge storm to carry off such a heavy statue," one user wrote.
Another wrote: "It was probably in Thailand or somewhere in Southeast Asia."
Doctored clip
A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the clip led to a video posted by popular YouTuber "Captain Disillusion" on December 12, 2018 (archived link).
The bio for the Captain Disillusion channel states it aims to teach children how to identify "visual fakery".
The video, titled "Mr. Flare Explains: The Virgin Mary", traces the origin of another widely shared clip appearing to show a Virgin Mary statue floating down the same street.
It goes on to deconstruct the video and trace it to a clip showing a large rubbish bin floating down a street during flash flooding in Tenerife, Spain, before going through the steps needed to create a similar doctored video (archived link).
"Staying on the theme of improving things, let's swap the mouldy old photo of the Virgin Mary statue for a cool textured 3D-model statue of the Buddha," the narration says, as the video showcases the changes.
"Then we just match the lighting, place some 3D dummies to simulate the reflections of close passing objects, add windshield reflections and rotoscope the foreground to end up with a much more believable result."
Further keyword and reverse image searches led to the original video of the flood published by Spanish news channel GranCanariaTV on its YouTube channel (archived link).
The video, titled "Container in the storm in Santa Cruz de Tenerife," was posted on October 25, 2018, days after flash floods hit the Spanish Canary Islands that month (archived link).
Below are screenshot comparisons between the doctored video (left) and corresponding scenes in the original video posted by GranCanariaTV (right):
The video corresponds to Google Street View imagery of a street in the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife (archived link).
The same video previously circulated alongside the false claim it showed flooding in China in 2020, which was debunked by AFP here.
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