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🇳🇵 Nepal /Disasters & Emergencies

In disaster aftermath, Nepal battles a flood of misinformation

From Kathmandu Post · () English

Summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

News Named sources Ongoing story
  • False and manipulated videos spread across social media after floods hit Nepal’s Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts, complicating rescue and information efforts.
  • A video falsely presented as showing Home Minister Sudan Gurung at the disaster site actually came from a tunnel rescue operation in Uttarakhand, India.
  • Other viral clips were identified as AI-generated, including one viewed more than seven million times, while fact-checkers worked to trace misleading footage.

As families searched for missing relatives after the Bhotekoshi floods, social media filled with images that did not show Nepal’s disaster at all. Some videos came from other countries or earlier events, while others appeared to have been digitally manipulated or created entirely with artificial intelligence.

One widely shared example falsely depicted Home Minister Sudan Gurung inside a tunnel at the disaster site. Dudhauli FM posted the 20-second clip on Facebook with a caption praising the minister’s supposed rescue efforts. The video then spread across Facebook, TikTok and X before fact-checkers established that it showed a tunnel rescue operation in Uttarakhand, India.

Home Minister Gurung's unique style: He reaches inside the tunnel at the incident site to join the rescue

— Dudhauli FMThe caption falsely claimed that a video from India showed Nepal’s home minister participating in rescue operations.

The footage matched an original video posted on Aug. 14 by the Fire Service Uttarakhand Police. Dudhauli FM later amended its caption. The false attribution added to confusion as rescuers tried to reach people trapped in tunnels and communities cut off by the flash floods.

No one imagined this would happen... What can anyone do when nature goes mad! May all those caught in the disaster be rescued safely

— Prakash KunwarThe caption accompanying a viral AI-generated flood video on X.

Another video posted on X appeared to show a catastrophic flood. Its caption expressed hope that those caught in the disaster would be rescued safely. By the time of reporting, the clip had attracted more than seven million views, over 4,100 reposts and about 15,000 reactions. Hive Moderation assessed it as 97.2 percent likely to be AI-generated. X community notes and BBC Verify also identified it as artificial.

A separate video appeared to show a bridge collapsing during a flood and was presented as footage of the Nepal-Tibet disaster. Hive Moderation assessed that clip as entirely AI-generated. International fact-checkers joined efforts to identify recycled footage, fabricated videos and misleading posts circulating during the emergency, while some users turned the disaster into viral content.

If this video of the Nepal-Tibet flood is true, I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime...

— Unspecified social media userThe caption accompanying a video that fact-checkers identified as entirely AI-generated.
About this summary

Originally published by Kathmandu Post. Summarized and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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