This video has circulated online in reports about a hailstorm in Australia since 2019
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on April 21, 2020 at 06:10
- 2 min read
- By AFP Thailand
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The video was published here on Facebook on April 2, 2020. It has been viewed more than one hundred of thousand times and shared 4,600 times.
The one-minute 56-second video shows large hailstones falling onto a parked car on a street.
Below is a screenshot of the misleading post:
The post’s Thai-language caption translates to English as: “It’s not a movie, not taken abroad but the incident happened in Chiang San district, Chiang Rai province today, another trouble in Thailand!!!?”
Chiang Rai is a province in northern Thailand.
The same video was shared alongside a similar claim here, here and here.
The claim is false.
A reverse Google image search using video keyframes extracted with InVID-WeVerify, a video verification tool, found the same video published on YouTube by ViralHog, a US-based viral content site.
The video, which has been viewed more than 47,000 times is titled “Surprise Hail Storm Smashes Car in Seconds || ViralHog”.
The video’s caption states: “Occurred on November 17, 2019 / Palmview, Queensland, Australia. A massive hail storm hit the Sunshine Coast. Within minutes cars were destroyed and $100,000’s worth of damage was done to cars and homes."
Below is the screenshot of the video in the misleading post (L) and the YouTube video (R):
A subsequent keyword search also found this report which included the video published on Australian news site 7news.com.au on November 18, 2019.
The article’s headline reads: “Brisbane hail: Severe storms to smash parts of southeast Queensland”.
Below is a screenshot of the article:
The report credits the video to the Facebook account of Lisa Thomas, who told AFP via email on April 14, 2020: “Yes I filmed that video of my daughter's car. It was filmed on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. The video is licensed through ViralHog. ”
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