2011 Video Showing Shaking Cars in Japan Falsely Linked to Earthquake in Turkey

The video dates back to 2011 and shows visuals from Sumida City in Tokyo, Japan.

The video has been on the internet since at least 2017 and is not related to the recent earthquake in Turkey.

(Source: Facebook/Altered by The Quint)

Dashcam footage showing vehicles shaking violently on the road is being shared on social media linking it to the recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria on 6 February.

An archive of this post can be seen here.

(Archives of more claims can be seen here, here and here.)

But..?: The video has been on the internet since 2017, and it shows visuals of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

• The video was taken on Metropolitan Highway 6 in Sumida City in Japan's Tokyo on 11 March 2011.

How did we find out?: We divided the viral video into multiple keyframes using InVID, a video verification tool.

• A reverse image search on one of these frames led us to a coloured version of the video, which we used for further investigation.

• Conducting a reverse image searches on stills from this coloured video took us to a website called 'redrum tokyo’.

• This website shared the video on 13 March 2017, mentioning that it showed Metropolitan Highway 6.

The video was uploaded in 2017.

• The page also carried a YouTube video with a title in Japanese, whose translated version mentioned that it showed "Metropolitan Expressway No. 6 at the time of the 3.11 earthquake Part 3."

• The video which showed a timestamp reading 2011.03.11 and carried location coordinates.

(Note: Swipe right to view both photos.)

The video was taken in 2011. 

The video carried coordinates.

Taking a cue from this, we checked the coordinates on Google Maps, which said that it showed Sumida City in Tokyo, Japan.

Google Maps showed the location as Sumida City in Tokyo, Japan.

• Using Google Maps' Street View feature, we were able to compare visuals of the video to what the coordinates led us to and saw that both stills showed similar buildings on the left.

The buildings match in both stills.

Conclusion: The video dates back to 2011 as per the date on the video and shows footage from Japan's Tokyo and is not related to the recent earthquake in Turkey.

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