Old video of an African being beaten in China circulates with COVID-19 angle
Claim: A video has been going viral showing black people being attacked by Asians with claims that this is linked with discrimination on the basis of the coronavirus pandemic. In the video, a black man is being pushed on the ground, kicked and also punched by a group of Asian men.
However, this is an old video which is circulated with a wrong context now.
A tweet with more than 3,000 retweets read “This is an African being violated, tortured and humiliated in China. What should we do with the Chinese on our lands?”
Such tweets garnered a lot of racist comments.
The tweet can be seen here and has been archived here.
The same video with false caption as shared multiple times of Facebook too.
The post has been archived here.
YOUTUBE
The video is also being shared on other platforms like YouTube.
It has been archived here.
TRUTH
According to Agency France-Presse (AFP), “African countries are seething over accounts that Africans are battling stigma and discrimination in China over the coronavirus pandemic, apparently linked to a cluster of cases in the Nigerian community in the southern city of Guangzhou.The African residents say they have suffered forced evictions, arbitrary quarantines and mass coronavirus tests and face discrimination in restaurants and hotels.”
A longer version of the video was found using tools like InVid which was uploaded in 2017. This confirms that this is an old video.
It has been archived here.
AFP found that the video in a Facebook post from June 12, 2015, captioned “Chinese beating Nigerian in China”.
One article from a Nigerian news site Vanguard featured that video with caption “A Nigerian man is being beaten by some Chinesemen because … Ikechukwu Obih posted the video on Facebook in June 2015.”
Using Chinese mapping service Baidu Maps, the same scene was traced where the even took place. It is a shopping arcade in the city of Foshan in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.
In the following collage, the above image shows a screenshot from the viral video and the below image confirms the place of the event take place from the Baidu maps.
Hence, the viral video taking rounds on social media is an old video which is not in any which ways related to the corona outbreak.
