This video shows a motorcyclist falling into a crater on a road in Brazil

This article is more than one year old.
Published on October 14, 2019 at 06:10
2 min read
By AFP India

A video that shows a motorcyclist falling into a pothole on a flooded street has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times in multiple Facebook and YouTube posts alongside a claim the incident happened in the south Indian city of Hyderabad. The claim is false; this is a four-year-old video from Brazil’s south-eastern city of Sao Paulo.

The 11-second clip was published here in a Facebook post on September 25, 2016. It has been viewed more than 130,000 times.

The post’s caption states: “Hyderabad. Manhole accident.”

Hyderabad is the capital city of the south Indian state of Telangana.

Below is a screenshot of the misleading Facebook post:

The same video was published on Facebook here and here and on YouTube here, here, here and here with a similar claim.

The claim is false; the video shows an accident in Brazil’s Sao Paulo city in January 2015.

A reverse image search on Yandex using keyframes from the video obtained with video verification tool InVID and a subsequent keyword search found this identical video published on YouTube on January 28, 2015.

The YouTube video’s title states: “Motorcycle falls in hole - Brazil.”

A video report about the same accident was published here on CBS News’ official YouTube channel on January 27, 2015.

The video’s title states: "Motorcyclist in Brazil hits a pothole."

"Video shows a motorcyclist in Sao Paulo, Brazil, driving into a pothole big enough to swallow his bike. The cyclist walked away unhurt. But the bike? Not so much. A tow truck had to pull it out of the huge hole caused by a broken water main. CBSN's Vladimir Duthiers reports,” says the video description.

CBS News also published the video here on its website.

Below are two sets of screenshot comparison of the video in misleading Facebook post (L) and the CBS News YouTube video (R):

The incident occurred in Sao Paulo on January 26, 2015, as reported here by a local media outlet.

The Portuguese language report’s opening paragraph translates to English as: “A motorcycle was swallowed by a crater in the Boturussu Park region, east of Sao Paulo, on Monday (26).”

The location of the accident in Sao Paulo can be accessed here on Instant Street View.

Below is a screenshot comparison of the location on Instant Street View (L) and the video in the misleading posts (R) with key identifying features circled in red by AFP:

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