A clickbait video circulating online spliced together clips of vehicles and homes shaking violently and a mid-rise building crumbling to the ground, and falsely claimed it shows scenes from an earthquake in Los Angeles, California.
Out of the eight clips in the video, five showed earthquakes in Japan, one in Taiwan, and another showed a controlled demolition in Türkiye.
The false, one-minute video first appeared on Aug. 13 on TikTok, a day after a magnitude 4.4 earthquake rattled Highland Park, California. It was reuploaded to Facebook and Instagram on Sept. 16, the same day a magnitude 3.7 earthquake shook Malibu, California and four days after a magnitude 4.7 earthquake affected the same area.
These three videos continue to circulate as of publishing.
Using reverse image search of the video’s keyframes, VERA Files Fact Check found that five of the videos were scenes taken during a magnitude 7.5 earthquake that happened at Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan on Jan. 1.
(Note: Click on the images on the left to view their original source.)
Meanwhile, another clip actually shows the demolition of a heavily-damaged building at Ebrar site in Kahramanmaraş, Türkiye.
(Note: Click on the image on the left to view its original source.)
Another clip showed a chandelier violently shaking in a living room during an earthquake near Hualien City, Taiwan on April 3.
(Note: Click on the image on the left to view its original source.)
VERA Files Fact Check could not verify the source of the first clip that showed a vehicle wildly shaking on the road during an earthquake. It is possible that the clip was captured in Japan. The license plate on the vehicle bears similar features seen in Japanese license plates.
TikTok user @disasters.occur (created on March 25) first published the video on Aug. 13, while Facebook (FB) page Disasters21 (created on July 7) and Instagram user @larus.world re-published the erroneous video on Sept. 16.
The videos garnered over 41,000 interactions and 1.1 million views on FB, 256 likes on Instagram, and 158,700 interactions on TikTok.
