A video has been viewed tens of thousands of times in multiple posts on Facebook, Weibo and Twitter that claim it shows people who committed suicide in the U.S. after contracting COVID-19.
The one-minute\xa055-second video shows people in protective gear moving what appears to be bodies washed up on a beach., Below is a screenshot of the misleading Facebook post:, The Simplified Chinese characters overlaid in the video translate to English as: “Infected Americans\xa0choose to commit suicide”., More than 12,000 people\xa0have died of COVID-19 in the US alongside some 395,000 other confirmed cases as\xa0of April 9, 2020,\xa0according to the World Health Organisation., The video was also shared here on Facebook, here on Weibo and here on Twitter, alongside a similar claim., The claim\xa0is false., A reverse image search on Yandex using keyframes extracted from the video found this identical footage. It was\xa0published by\xa0Turkish news site\xa0Haberler.com on Dailymotion, a video platform, on August 26, 2014., , The video was also included\xa0in this\xa0article on the Haberler.com website., The article’s Turkish-language headline translates to English as: “The sinking of a boat carrying illegal immigrants in Libya”., It reads, in part: "It is reported that the number of people who died as a result of the sinking of the boat carrying African illegal immigrants in Libya has exceeded 200., “The Navy spokesperson, Eyyub Kasım, has been searching at sea since Saturday to reach the corpse of immigrants in the sinking boat. He stated that his works are continuing.”, "The report credits the video to Turkeys state-run Anadolu Agency.", Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the misleading Facebook post at its 36-second mark (L)\xa0and the Haberler.com video at its 30-second mark (R):, The incident was also reported by other local media, including the newspapers Posta and Takvim, and also on the news website Mynet., , Copyright © AFP 2017-2020.  All rights reserved.  Users can access and consult this website and use the share features available for personal, private, and non-commercial purposes.  Any other use, in particular any reproduction, communication to the public or distribution of the content of this website, in whole or in part, for any other purpose and/or by any other means, without a specific licence agreement signed with AFP, is strictly prohibited.  The subject matter depicted or included via links within the Fact Checking content is provided to the extent necessary for correct understanding of the verification of the information concerned.  AFP has not obtained any rights from the authors or copyright owners of this third party content and shall incur no liability in this regard.  AFP and its logo are registered trademarks.
This video first appeared in 2014 reports about migrants who drowned off the Libyan coast | AFP Fact Check