Social media posts claiming to show buildings collapsing during earthquakes in Venezuela actually used old footage filmed in Turkey [1].
The mislabeling of these videos matters because it creates a false perception of the scale of destruction in Venezuela. By using dramatic imagery from a different country and time, the posts exaggerate the impact of recent seismic events to mislead the public.
According to a fact-check by the CBC News team, the videos in question were recorded prior to the recent social media posts [1]. The footage specifically pre-dates the 2023 earthquakes in Turkey, though the buildings shown were located there rather than in South America [1].
"The videos are old and were filmed in Turkey, not Venezuela," the CBC News fact-check team said [1].
The misinformation spread through various social media platforms, where the footage was repurposed to suggest a crisis in Venezuela. This type of digital manipulation often relies on the lack of geographic familiarity for viewers, making it easier to pass off footage from one region as evidence of a disaster in another [1].
Verification efforts focused on the visual evidence and the timeline of the recordings. The team determined that the structural failures and debris seen in the clips matched documented damage from previous events in Turkey [1]. This confirms that the content was stripped of its original context to serve a different narrative regarding Venezuelan earthquakes [1].
“The videos are old and were filmed in Turkey, not Venezuela.”
This incident highlights the ongoing challenge of 'digital recycling,' where dramatic footage from past global disasters is repurposed to fuel misinformation about current events. By misattributing the location and timing of the collapses, the creators of these posts attempted to manufacture a sense of urgency or catastrophe that was not supported by the actual conditions on the ground in Venezuela.
