IN SHORT: A video is circulating on social media with the claim it shows an earthquake that struck Morocco in September 2023. But this isn’t true and the video is of several unrelated natural disasters.
A video posted on Facebook claims to show the disastrous September 2023 earthquake in Morocco.
The video, posted on 11 September 2023, is captioned: “Morocco Earthquake, lets pray for Morocco.”
Earthquakes are a sudden aggressive shaking of the ground, caused by too much energy building up along the Earth’s crust. A 6.8-magnitude earthquake hit Morocco on 8 September, followed by several minor tremors in the days after. Thousands of people were killed, scores more unaccounted for and some buildings destroyed.
The video has received over 200 comments and viewed more than 150,000 times.
But does the video show the earthquake in Morocco? We checked.
Video shows different events
A Google reverse image search of keyframes from the video revealed that it was made up of shorter clips from separate events.
From 14 to 31 seconds, the video shows drone footage of a powerful tornado ripping through the US state of Kansas. US-based news channel, ABC News, posted the clip on YouTube in May 2022, with the caption: “EF3 tornado tears through Andover, Kansas.”
For about eight seconds, starting from the 1:01 mark, the video shows a house falling into a flooded river in Alaska, also a US state, in August 2023. Several news agencies reported on this.
No part of the video appears to show an earthquake. All the clips appear to show tornado, floods and heavy rains and winds, in separate incidents in different areas.
While we couldn’t pinpoint where all the clips in the video come from, the claim that it shows the earthquake that hit Morocco in September 2023 is false.
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