Fact checks

‘Crazy’ tanker truck explosion in South Africa? No, video from Brazil

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New ways to make money on Twitter, now Elon Musk’s X, could be behind the otherwise inexplicable mislabelling of a dramatic video.

MARY ALEXANDER • 22 July 2024

‘Crazy’ tanker truck explosion in South Africa? No, video from Brazil

“That Limpopo explosion that took place today is crazy,” reads the caption of a video circulating on social media in South Africa. “Hope everyone who was trying to help survived.”*

The 12-second clip shows a tanker truck burning on the side of a road. It then explodes and flames cover the screen. The rest of the video is the camera tumbling to capture random images as someone cries out.

Limpopo is South Africa’s northernmost province, on the border with Zimbabwe. Some captions put the video’s location as “between Louis Trichardt and Tshakuma”, meaning Tshakhuma, two settlements close to the border.

Others blame South African authorities.

“Why are people of this calibre given responsibility that is clearly beyond them?” one caption reads. “If this is ‘equality’ or ‘equity’ is it is also murder and destruction. It threatens us all in so many ways, but we can’t change the nature of the beast or its privileges.”

But does the video really show a “crazy” explosion in South Africa’s Limpopo province?

Road markings not from South Africa

The viral claim most likely began with a 4 July post by a verified X account.

But in the comments, other X users were quick to call wanya: “You can see Those road markings are not for South African roads.”

Another commented: “This is a Propane explosion that happened on the BR-010 near the Paragominas Palace Hotel in Brazil.”

The comment includes a link to a Portuguese-language news article that includes the video. Brazil is a country in South America. Its official language is Portuguese.

A machine translation of the headline reads: “Tanker truck explodes after accident on highway in Pará; videos show moment.”

According to the article, the tanker exploded after an accident on a highway between the municipalities of Paragominas and Ulianópolis in Brazil’s northern state of Pará. Three people were injured. The accident was on 3 July, the day before the viral claim popped up online.

A Google search using the keywords “tanker explosion Pará Brazil” led to several other news reports on the incident, all placing it in the South American country.

There have been no news reports of a recent tanker explosion in South Africa’s Limpopo.

EU law threatens X monetisation

One of the comments on the original X post suggests that the false claim is simply to attract attention: “atleast you’ll get the views! Limpopo is Brazil this today?”

Since Elon Musk bought X (then Twitter) in 2022, users have been able to earn money on the platform through subscriptions and advertising. But they have to be verified users, and this monetisation requires high engagement with their posts – views and comments.

There have been concerns that monetisation feeds sensationalist disinformation on the platform.

In October 2023 Musk threatened to demonetise X creators who posted false information. “Any posts that are corrected by Community Notes become ineligible for revenue share,” he posted.

This came after the European Union challenged Musk to clamp down on the site’s false content, illegal under the EU’s Digital Services Act.

The act aims to ensure a “safe, predictable and trusted online environment, addressing the dissemination of illegal content online and the societal risks that the dissemination of disinformation or other content may generate”.

* Some Facebook and Instagram users may have deleted their posts after Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program rated their claims as untrue.

Report published by Africa Check on 13 August 2024

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