Fact Check: Typhoon Doksuri didn’t make this scooter fly in China, this video is old  

By Jyoti Dwivedi:

A startling video of a scooter flying away due to strong winds is being widely shared on social media. Allegedly, this happened during the recent Typhoon Doksuri in China. The typhoon made landfall in Mainland China on July 28 unleashing heavy rain and violent gusts of wind. Thousands of people had to be evacuated after the cyclone brought record rainfall.

A Twitter user posted this video and wrote, “OMG, Scooter blown away like a paper by powerful winds Fujian, China #TyphoonDoksuri”. The archived version of two such claims can be seen here and here.

India Today found that the incident seen in this video is not related to Typhoon Doksuri. Instead, it is related to Typhoon Soudelor which approached Taiwan on August 7, 2015.

Our Probe

Using reverse search, we found that many social media users had shared this video in August 2015 with Chinese language captions.

A Twitter user at the time had written alongside the video, “Typhoon: the crazy video! #Soudelor watch your scooter!”

Further searches led us to the August 8, 2015, report by the Taiwanese news channel Era News. Per this report, this incident happened in Kaohsiung in Taiwan during the typhoon. According to Set News, another Taiwanese news channel, it happened near the Jianmei departmental store.

This incident was reported by multiple Taiwanese news channels in August 2015. Some such reports can be seen here, and here.

Per the reports, Typhoon Soudelor which hit Taiwan on August 7, 2015, killed at least six people. It is very likely that the viral video could be related to this typhoon as most reports related to this typhoon were published on August 8, 2015.

Therefore, it’s more than clear that an old video was falsely shared in the wake of Typhoon Doksuri.