A viral video claiming to show a magnitude 7.2 earthquake in Coracora, Ayacucho, actually shows a 2015 earthquake in Nepal. The security camera recording circulated across social media platforms following the tremor that hit the southern Peruvian region on August 20.
Fact-checkers at Verificador de La República confirmed that the footage portrays the opening moments of the devastating earthquake that struck Nepal on April 25, 2015. The original video displays a timestamp matching the date of the South Asian quake.
The miscaptioned video shows a wide avenue as the ground begins to shake. Before fact-checkers debunked the post, the most widely shared publication had accumulated 122,000 views, 2,000 likes, and more than 80 shares on Facebook.
A reverse image search led researchers to the original security camera clip uploaded to YouTube. In addition to the visible date and time recorded by the camera, the original video title explicitly identifies the footage as the Nepal earthquake of April 2015.
Repeated Misinformation in Peru
This is not the first time social media users have misrepresented this specific clip during seismic events in Peru. In 2022, the same recording went viral following a strong earthquake in the southern Andean region of Puno.
During the 2022 incident, Verificador de La República published a verification report disproving claims that the footage originated in Puno. The team established that the recording was unrelated to Peruvian seismic activity and had been recycled from the Asian continent.
Coracora, the capital of Parinacochas province in Peru's Ayacucho region, sits in a seismically active zone along the South American tectonic plate. Nepal, a mountainous nation in the Himalayas, suffered thousands of casualties during its magnitude 7.8 earthquake in April 2015. Fact-checking units such as Verificador, which operates through Peruvian newspaper La República, regularly monitor digital networks to counter misattributed multimedia content following natural disasters.
