After a devastating earthquake struck China’s remote Tibetan region, photos of destroyed buildings and cars have gone viral in social media posts falsely claiming to show the aftermath of the disaster. This photo was actually taken in Hatay province, Türkiye, after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake occurred in February 2023.
A post written in Nepali and English on January 7 by
It shared a dramatic photo of a collapsed building surrounded by rubble next to a Turkish store sign that reads “Mursaloğlu Cam Balkon.”
The photo circulated in news reports and social media posts in multiple languages, including English, Hindi, French and Vietnamese, after an earthquake struck China’s remote Tibetan region on January 7, killing at least 126 people (archive link).
A further 188 people were injured and thousands of buildings were damaged in the quake that struck rural, high-altitude Tingri County, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Mount Everest near the China-Nepal border. Earthquakes were also felt in neighboring Nepal and India, but no casualties occurred.
The China Earthquake Network Center (CENC) measured the magnitude of the earthquake as 6.8, and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) announced the magnitude as 7.1.
Screenshot of falsely shared X post captured on January 9, 2024
However, a reverse image search of the photo on Google revealed that it appeared in news reports about the February 6, 2023, earthquake that killed more than 50,000 people in southeastern Turkey and parts of Syria (archived here).
Read the headline of an article in The Architect’s Newspaper dated March 31, 2023. “Why were we caught unprepared for the Kahramanmaraş earthquake?”
Karamanmaras is a Turkish city located just 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the epicenter of the first major earthquake.
The story was written by Turkish urban planner Tayfun Kahraman, who explores the lessons we can learn from the earthquake from an architectural and urban planning perspective.
This photo was shared in a false social media post accompanying the article with the caption “Earthquake damage in the Mediterranean coastal city of Iskenderun, Hatay Province, Turkey (Çağlar Oskay/Unsplash).”
A keyword search on Google found the original photo, posted on the stock image website Unsplash by photographer Çağlar Oskay on February 24, 2023 (archived link).
The photo caption says the photo was taken in Iskenderun on February 6, 2023.
AFP used the store sign in the photo to identify the location at 86 Ziya Gökalp Cd in İskenderun (archived link).
The initial earthquake and its thousands of aftershocks caused more than 850,000 buildings to collapse (archived link).
A year later, hundreds of thousands of people remain displaced, many of them living in container cities.
