This video was created with digital effects and does not show supernatural car crashes

Copyright AFP 2017-2021. All rights reserved. A video has been viewed thousands of times in Facebook, Weibo, Twitter and YouTube posts that claim it shows ‘supernatural car crashes’ in China. The claim is false: the video was created using digital effects from footage of traffic collisions. The video has been viewed more than 8,000 times since it was posted on Facebook on March 19, 2021. It shows various clips of cars that appear to crash without colliding with other vehicles. “In the Gannan area of Gansu province, many armed police and staff members from the Chinese Academy of Sciences were dispatched. Five kilometres around the area were blocked,” the simplified Chinese caption reads. “Because as the cars came here, they would collide with something unknown, which is quite strange and inexplicable.” Screenshot taken on June 1, 2021 of the misleading Facebook post The same video has circulated online since at least 2018, including here and here on Facebook; here and here on the Chinese social networking site Weibo; here and here on Twitter; and also on YouTube. However, the claim is false: the video was created using digital effects and does not show supernatural car crashes. Reverse image and keyword searches found the video…
Read More