As reports emerged that parts of a newly constructed road in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya had collapsed due to heavy rains in June 2024, an old video resurfaced in social media posts that falsely portrayed it as the road destroyed. But the video has already circulated online in reports about a collapsed trail in northeastern Brazil in June 2022.
The video was shared with the false claim on social media platform X on July 3, 2024.
It shows someone walking on a road and falling off a section that suddenly collapses.
“The Rampath road in Ayodhya is in this condition after the first rain,” read part of the post’s caption, referring to a newly constructed urban road in the northern holy city that local media reported saw parts collapse due to monsoon flooding the previous month (archived link).
The post then appeared to criticize the quality of recent infrastructure in Ayodhya.
The city saw a influx of projects along with the construction of a large temple to the deity Ram, which was built on the grounds of a century-old mosque razed by Hindu fanatics in 1992 (archived link).
Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the temple in January in a ceremony widely celebrated across India, with back-to-back television coverage and street parties.
The video was also shared along with similar claims on Facebook.
It was also shared on others Posts which falsely linked it to the state of Gujarat, where road collapses also occurred recently reported (archived link).
The state is a stronghold of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
Reports from Brazil
A reverse image search on Google, however, discovered that the video was flipped horizontally from images published by Brazilian media. UOL on June 2, 2022 (archived link).
The report states that it shows security camera images of a woman falling into a crater in the municipality of Cascavel, in the northeast of the state of Ceará.
Below is a comparison of screenshots of the video shared in the fake posts (left) and the images uploaded in the media report (right):
A yellow bus that appears at the 10-second mark of the video has “Escolar” – which means “school” in Portuguese – written on the side. School buses in Brazil they often come with “School” signage.
Local media g1 It is The people also shared the video in reports about the Cascavel incident, saying that the sidewalk gave way due to heavy rain in the region (file links here It is here).
The Ayodhya police also debunked the allegations regarding the video in a statement about X on July 4, 2024.
police superintendent Madhuvan Kumar Singh said a case has been registered against two individuals for sharing it on social media (archived link).
