What was claimed
A video shows an earthquake taking place in Turkey.
Our verdict
The video shows a 7.8 magnitude earthquake which occurred in Nepal in April 2015.
Footage claiming to show recent earthquake in Turkey actually shows 2015 earthquake in Nepal
7 February 2023
A Facebook post claiming to show “rare” footage of an earthquake in Turkey actually features a clip showing an earthquake in Nepal in 2015.
The video, captioned “Earthquake (Turkey) - Visible Lateral Ground Movement”, shows the moment people on a road begin to experience a tremor. At the time of writing the post had been viewed more than 77,000 times.
However, the same clip was shared to YouTube some seven years ago, featuring a timestamp which shows the footage was filmed on 25 April 2015 at around 11:50 am—the date of a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Nepal. This timestamp has been blurred out of the version shared on Facebook.
While we’ve not been able to identify the precise location of the footage, the vehicles shown do appear to carry Nepalese number plates.
Misleading social media posts often circulate on social media in the wake of major news events and disasters, and we’ve previously written about similar wrongly attributed videos claiming to have been filmed during the war in Ukraine, or shortly before an aeroplane crash.
For more information on how to verify viral video footage, see our guide.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the video footage was filmed during an earthquake in Nepal in 2015.