Fact check: False flood videos spread in India and Pakistan

Severe monsoon rains have caused devastating floods in parts of Pakistan and India, displacing thousands of people. But not every video claiming to show the destruction is real. Much of the content is either unrelated or  AI-generated. Common scenes with AI content include destroyed markets, trains stranded in water, and helicopter rescues. 

AI trains stuck in the floods

Claim: A user on Instagram posted a video of a train stuck in the floods suggesting it showed the current flooding in Patna, India. 

DW Fact check: Fake. 

Through a reverse image search with a screenshot of the video showing the stuck train, DW Fact check tracked it back to the initial account where the clip was first posted. The account's description says it's an "AI Video creator" and the channel points out that that the video in question "is completely Al generated (...) Please don't take it as real footage." 

Even without that information, it's easy to spot the typical errors made by  Artificial Intelligence. The hands of the AI-generated figures partially melt into each other in an unnatural way. The persons' hair also does not look real. 

Another indicator of AI-generated content can be the writing seen on the train. While the words at the top of the video are indeed in Hindi, two DW journalists who knows Indian languages and scripts could not identify the writing on the train. The characters seem to be inspired by Punjabi or Hindi, but are not attributed to any Indian script, even though the train does resemble those in South Asia.

Additionally, there have been no news reports mentioning any such incident in Patna.  

Several social media users have shared dramatic scenes showing trains trapped in the flooding or helicopters rescuing people from trains and cars . A lot of those videos have one thing in common: They are AI-generated. Even though there are devastating floods in both countries and helicopter rescues do happen, these rescue operations are not real. Here too, the typical AI-errors can be spotted. In one alleged helicopter rescue, the helicopter's rotor blades turn both left and right at the same time. 

YouTube Shorts is now labelling some of the videos  as AI generated — but not all of them.  

Is this van being swept away in Pakistan?  

Claim: A user on facebook claims that a video is showing flooding in Lahore, Pakistan, implying that it is recent. The description on the video says: "A huge tragedy: the entire school bus, including the children, is swept away by the floodwaters." It shows a green van being swept away by water until it eventually sinks. Scenes from this video are also shared by other users in the current flood context.  

DW Fact check: False.

Through a reverse image search, DW Fact check found a YouTube videoshowing the incident from another angle. The video was taken originally in 2022 during floods in Iran and the text below the YouTube video says in Farsi: "On July 30, passengers of a van traveling on the road from Miami to Chenark in Iran's Razavi Khorasan province were caught in a flash flood." Farsi-language sources from 2022 confirm that this incident did take place and that a van was swept away by the floods. At least seven passengers lost their lives in the incident.  

In late July 2022, Iran was hit by several floods and mudslides. Back then, DW reported about videos being posted on social media that showed cars caught in the rising waters and carried away.  

Is this cloudburst in Pakistan? 

Claim: At the end of August, a user shared a video of a cloudburst, linking it to the current floods in Pakistan. The text at the top video in Urdu reads "cloudburst scenes." One user comments below the video, suspecting that it was created with AI. The video also already appeared a few weeks earlier on TikTok.  

DW Fact check: False.  

The video suggests that the cloudburst took place in Pakistan, while acutally, it shows a scene in Australia from 2020. A reverse image search of a screenshot from the video leads to another YouTube upload of 2020. The text on that video says "Kane Artie Photography".  Kane Artie is a photographer based in Perth who shared a still from a timelapse video of a microburst in February 2020. It shows the same scene as in the video that is being shared currently in the context with Pakistan.  

The video has already been used several times in misleading contexts, for instance in connection with a flood disaster in Spain or in Bangalore, India. But it is definitely unrelated to the recent floods in Pakistan and India.

Edited by: Uta Steinwehr