DigitEye India Fact Checkers
A video of a bulldozer scooping out water from a street and dumping it on a truck is going viral. The video is making rounds on WhatsApp. The 0:27 minute-long video shows the bulldozer scooping out water only to put it on the truck. The water gushes out from the truck making the entire effort futile. The claim that is going viral along with the video is in Tamil.
It reads,
உலக நாடுகள் வியந்து பார்க்கும் திராவிட மாடல்
(Translation: The Dravidian model that the world admires)
Digiteye India received a request on WhatsApp to fact check this viral video.
FACT CHECK
The Digiteye India team used inVID – a video verification tool – to break the video into multiple keyframes. Using these keyframes, we ran a Reverse Image Search on Google to find out the veracity of the viral video. One of the results led us to a Facebook page that had posted the same video on August 31, 2020. The page was from Rawalpindi, Pakistan and they had not mentioned the location of the video. This helps us to understand that the video is not recent but has been in circulation for long.
We used other keyframes to look further. Another result led us to a Russian news portal that shared the same video on November 29, 2018. They claimed that the video showed a bulldozer dumping water into the back of the truck in Baghdad, Iraq.
The Digiteye India team conducted a keyword search. We found this tweet by Abdulaziz Mujahed, an Al Jazeera Mubasher correspondent. In a tweet dating back to November 28, 2018, he had shared a clearer version of the same video. He wrote, “Watch how water is withdrawn from the streets of Baghdad in a very, very professional way.”
شاهد كيف يتم سحب المياه من شوارع بغداد بطريقة احترافية جدا جدا 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/iJ5dYHkSzM
— عبدالعزيز مجاهد|Abdulaziz Mujahed (@elmogahed02) November 28, 2018
However, in the next tweet on November 29, 2018, he mentioned “some followers say that the photo is from the Ahvaz region.”
*تصحيح
بعض المتابعين يقولون أن الصورة من منطقة الأهواز— عبدالعزيز مجاهد|Abdulaziz Mujahed (@elmogahed02) November 29, 2018
We conducted further searches and found this video that was posted on YouTube on November 27, 2018. The title and the description of the video state “The new method of collecting water from the surface of the streets of Ahvaz, which was invented by the Islamic Republic of Iran!”
A report mentions that heavy rain ravaged Iran, Iraq and Kuwait in 2018. The claim that is going viral with the video is, hence, false.
CLAIM: Social media posts allege that a viral video shows a bulldozer scooping out water and dumping it on the back of a truck in rain-lashed Tamil Nadu.
CONCLUSION: The video has been in circulation for years. It is from 2018 when Iran was ravaged by floods. The video shows the bulldozer clearing out mud and debris.
RATING: Misinterpretation — 
