This video has circulated since 2017 in reports about an incident in China’s Guizhou province

This article is more than one year old.
Published on June 30, 2020 at 10:00
2 min read
By AFP Hong Kong

Footage of a car being swept down a river has been viewed tens of thousands of times in multiple posts on Weibo, Facebook and Twitter alongside a claim it shows an incident that occurred in the Chinese city of Chongqing following heavy rain in late-June 2020. The claim is false; the same footage has circulated in Chinese media reports since at least August 2017 about an incident in China’s Guizhou province.

The one-minute 19-second video was published on Weibo here on June 28, 2020. It has since been viewed more than 440 times.

The video’s simplified Chinese caption translates to English as:
“/Oh god! The rain in Chongqing is way too heavy this year!
"Car and people got trapped, should have rescued people without caring about the car!
"Can't give up property rather than lives!
"People from the car were all washed away by the flood!”

A screenshot taken on June 29, 2020, of the misleading post by Weibo user 无可替代的你自己

Chongqing and other cities in southern China experienced major storms in late June 2020. The heavy rain killed at least 12 people and sparked mass evacuations, as AFP reported here.

The video was also shared alongside a similar claim on Facebook here and here, and on Twitter here, here and here.

The claim is false.

A reverse image search with video keyframes found the same footage was published here by FM1035 Huzhou Traffic Radio on September 12, 2017.

The article states that an off-road vehicle was washed into a river in Guizhou province on the afternoon of August 30, 2017. The footage shared in the misleading posts can be seen in the article’s embedded video in the first eight seconds. It can also be seen from the 55-second mark to the one-minute six-second mark.

Below are two sets of comparisons between the video in the misleading Weibo post (L) and the video included in the Chinese media article (R):

Comparisons between the misleading Weibo video (L) and the video included in the article (R)

The same incident was also reported on in 2017 by other Chinese media organisations, including here by the news site The Paper and here by Beijing Youth Daily.

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