The balance sheet, tragic, continues to grow heavier since Monday. The earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria hard aroused emotion and a wave of international solidarity. Many images and videos of the disaster are circulating online. In this flow of images, several intox have been relayed on Twitter or even TikTok. 20 minutes checked them.
- No, this photo does not show a dog rescuing an earthquake victim.
The image is strong: a dog standing on ruins, paw touching a hand emerging from under the rubble. “The heartbreaking photo of the day,” commented an English-speaking user on Twitter, when he published it on February 6.
However, this photo was not taken that day: it actually dates from 2018. A reverse image search links to Alamy website, where photographers can upload their images. Jaroslav Noska, a Czech photographer, says he took the shot on October 18, 2018. He has published twenty shots featuring this rescue dog.
The cliché is regularly used when an earthquake hits a country. It had already circulated in 2019 and 2020.
Some netizens also shared it along with a photo of a child squatting on rubble with his head in his hands.
This image, again, was not taken after Monday’s earthquakes. She comes from from the Shutterstock site, another image database and had already been used in 2019 when an earthquake hit Albania.
- No, this prayer in Mecca was not said for the victims of the earthquake of February 6
On the video of about thirty seconds, one can read in Turkish the inscription “May God save Turkey”, which surely caused confusion.
The video is at least six years old. We find her on a Turkish YouTube channelwhere it was posted on July 18, 2016.
- Lightning in the sky before the earthquake? This video does not show it
For about twenty seconds, a video relayed on Twitter shows a night sky torn by lightning. “Something strange happened in the sky in Turkey before the earthquake,” notes a user who shared the video.
As the date partially visible at the top left of the video suggests, these images do not date from a few hours or a few days before the earthquake. They were recorded on November 23, 2022. find them on the YouTube channel of the Turkish media İHA. He explains that these flashes appeared in Düzce, a city halfway between Istanbul and Ankara, a few seconds after the start of an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.9. 93 people had been injured according to the Turkish Interior Ministry.
- Did birds or a dog predict the earthquake?
Two videos showing a howling dog and flocks of birds gathering on top of trees were shared on social media after the earthquake, but there was no reliable indication of where or when they were shot. .
The birds visible in the video are Jackdaws, confirmed the League for the Protection of Birds (LPO) at TF1 info. On the images, they “get together in a dormitory as they usually do”, explains the LPO, for whom it is “difficult to see a direct link with the earthquake a few hours later”.
If animals behave unusual before humans feel the earthquake, it may be because they can feel a first wave of the earthquake that humans do not perceive, has explained Lucile Bruhat, earthquake specialist, at The voice of the North. “In reality, when animals adopt bizarre behavior, it means that the earthquake has already started,” she concludes.