This video shows three clips that have all circulated online in reports about other US fires
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on September 30, 2020 at 11:30
- 3 min read
- By AFP Hong Kong
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The video was published on Twitter here on September 27, 2020. It has been viewed more than 20,400 times.
The one-minute 51-second long video includes three pieces of footage that show fire burning inside trees and in an underground crevasse.
The post’s simplified Chinese-language caption translates to English as: “United States September 26, 2020
"West Coast Fire Brigade
"Millions of acres of land on the West Coast of the United States burned in wildfires.
"The flames were still burning underground at a temperature above 1,000 degrees, which is unbelievable. It was burning inside a tree.”
The video was also shared alongside a similar claim on Facebook here, here and here.
The claim is false.
First clip
A keyword search found the first piece of footage, which shows a fire inside a tree trunk, was published here by US weekly magazine Newsweek on October 22, 2019, nearly one year before the date claimed in the misleading posts.
The footage embedded in the article corresponds with the first 15 seconds of the video in the misleading posts.
A look inside a tree that has been struck by lightning. pic.twitter.com/IGcgu00fYm
— So Fain (@sofain) October 20, 2019
Below is a screenshot comparison of the footage in the misleading tweet (L) and the video embedded in Newsweek’s article (R):
Second clip
A reverse image search with video keyframes extracted from the second piece of footage also found that it predates the misleading posts. The footage was published here by television news station KPTV, based in the US state of Oregon, on September 22, 2020.
The video package is headlined: “'You do not want to fall into this': Firefighter shares video of fire underground in Detroit”.
Detroit is a city in the northeast US, about 2,100 miles (3,379km) away from the wildfires along the US West Coast in September 2020.
Footage from the KPTV video corresponds with the misleading Twitter video’s 15-second mark to the one-minute 36-second mark.
Below are screenshot comparisons of the misleading Twitter video (L) and the KPTV video (R):
Third clip
Another reverse image search with video keyframes found the third piece of footage was published on YouTube here on August 19, 2020, more than one month before the date claimed in the misleading posts.
The video’s title reads: “Fire Burning Inside of a Tree with Nothing Else Burning”.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the misleading Twitter video (L) and the YouTube video (R):
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