This video has circulated in reports about flooding in southern China in May 2018

This article is more than one year old.
Published on October 28, 2020 at 09:15
3 min read
By AFP India

A video of a traffic light being swept away along a flooded street has been viewed tens of thousands of times in multiple posts on Facebook and Twitter alongside a claim it was captured in the Indian city of Hyderabad in 2020. The claim is false; the video has circulated online since May 2018 in reports about flooding in the Chinese city of Yulin.

The video was published on Twitter here on October 15, 2020. It has been viewed more than 33,200 times.

A screenshot, taken on October 20, 2020, of the misleading post.

The tweet reads: “First time in History the signal crossing the road… #HyderabadFloods #HyderabadRain #HyderabadHeavy Rains”.

The video was published alongside a similar claim on Facebook here, here, here, here and here, and on Twitter here. It also circulated in September 2019 alongside a claim that the flood occurred in India on Twitter here, here, here and here.

The claim, however, is false.

A frame-by-frame analysis of the video found two shop banners and a sticker on a motorcycle written in simplified Chinese at the three-second mark and the six-second mark respectively.

A screenshot, taken on October 23, 2020, of the misleading post with the shop banners and motorcycle sticker circled in red by AFP.

A reverse image search on Google for a keyframe of the video found an extended version of the clip published on YouTube here by Chinese state media China Global Television Network on May 11, 2018.

A screenshot, taken on October 22, 2020, of the CGTN YouTube video.

The video is titled: “Dramatic moment: ‘Walking’ traffic light gets swept down the flooded street in China”.

A selection of the video description reads: “The video, which was filmed in Yulin City of south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, shows a temporary traffic light being swept down a street by flood waters.”

Yulin City is one of the fourteen prefecture-level cities of China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

Another reverse image search on Google found similar footage published in 2018 on Twitter here by Chinese state media organisation People’s Daily China and on the site's Weibo channel here.

People’s Daily China wrote in the comments under the tweet that the video was taken in Yulin, Guangxi Province in May 2018.

A screenshot, taken on October 20, 2020, of the Weibo video and a screenshot, taken on October 23, 2020, of the tweet from the People’s Daily China.

The false claim was also debunked by Indian fact-checking organisation Boom Live here on October 16, 2020.

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