Footage from Japan in 2011, shared as scenes from Recent Earthquake in Turkey!

Old video showing cars on a highway swaying during the 2011 earthquake in Tokyo, Japan.

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake hit Turkey and neighboring Syria early on 6 February 2023; following this, several unverified images, videos, and claims have surfaced on social media. Amidst this, a video appears to be shot from the dashboard of a car and shows the vehicles ahead of it shaking violently as tremors hit the area has gone viral.

Social Media Posts

The caption of the video states, "Turkey Earthquake. May Allah forgive all our sins."

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Fact Check-

A Google reverse image search using the keyframes from the viral video led us to a coloured version of this viral clip. The 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 depicted Metropolitan Highway 6.

The page also carried a YouTube video with a title in Japanese, which translated to English as "Metropolitan Expressway No. 6 at the time of the 3.11 earthquake Part 3."

The video showed a timestamp reading 2011.03.11, time 2:49 pm, and coordinates.

Later we checked the coordinates on Google Maps, which showed Sumida City in Tokyo, Japan.

We were also able to compare visuals from the video to what the coordinates led us to by using the Google Maps Street View feature, and both stills showed similar buildings on the left.

So these evidence shows us that the viral video is attributed to Shutoko Metropolitan Expressway in Tokyo city, Japan, during the March 2011 earthquake. It is reported to be the most powerful earthquake recorded in Japan in 2011 and which triggered a Tsunami back then.

Conclusion-

Fact Crescendo found the claim made along with the viral video to be False. The viral video was an old video showing cars on a highway swaying during the 2011 earthquake in Tokyo, Japan. It has no relation to the recent earthquake in Turkey.