A video of black birds swarming a Walmart store is being shared on social media with the claim that it is from a recent incident in Saudi Arabia where “birds were not allowing customers to come out of the store.”
However, we found that the video is as old as 2016 and is from Texas in the United States.
THE CLAIM
The claim with which the aforementioned video is being shared reads: “Scary : Crows not allowing customers to come out of super market in Saudi .. is it the beginning of the end of the world ?? (sic)”
The video is massively viral on Twitter and Facebook with the same misleading claim.
WHAT WE FOUND
A Google search using the keywords “Birds attack parking lot” helped us find a Facebook post by Daily Mail which carried the same video. Dated 18 April, the post established that the location of the video is HMart in Texas and attributed it to a website called Viral Hog.
Next, we found the original uploaded on Viral Hog on 17 April.
We were able to match frames to establish that the viral video is the same as the one uploaded on Viral Hog’s YouTube channel.
According to the description of the video, the incident is from 6 December 2016 when black birds were seen in huge numbers in Carrollton, Texas, USA.
We used Google street view to establish the exact location of the incident as HMart store in Carrollton, Texas state.
Clearly a video from an incident from Texas, dating back to 2016 is being shared with a misleading claim that it is from Saudi Arabia to create panic amid the coronavirus crisis.
(You can read all our coronavirus related fact-checked stories here.)
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