Digging with their bare hands, rescuers in Myanmar have pulled several trapped people to safety in the days following a devastating 7.7-magnitude earthquake, videos circulating on social media show.
In one, a cell phone video taken by two teenage girls, ages 13 and 16, shows them trapped with their 75-year-old grandmother in the cramped darkness of a collapsed apartment building in Mandalay, a city near the epicenter of Friday’s quake.
Video: ‘We’re trapped in here!’ 75-year-old woman and her two teenage granddaughters call for help
“We’re trapped in here! We’re trapped in here!” one of them calls out desperately. One girl taps with something metallic on a concrete slab to signal to rescuers where they are.
Only the light of a mobile phone illuminates the claustrophobic scene. Briefly, we get a glimpse of the grandmother’s bloodied face.
Their cell phone signals reached residents, who worked feverishly to dig them out. Separate video footage shows a cluster of men lifting chunks of cement with their bare hands. “We’re ready to uncover them!” one shouts.
The final seconds of the footage shows the three being carried out of the rubble on stretchers on Sunday — a happy ending amid the gloom of the worst earthquake to hit Myanmar in decades.
The military-run country is ill-equipped to respond to the disaster. It is mired in a four-year civil war that has already displaced 3 million people.
So far, the quake has killed more than 3,000 people in Myanmar, according to the military junta that took power in a 2021 coup.
Video: 13-year-old rescued from collapsed monastery in Mandalay, Myanmar
In another video, a 13-year-old girl named Pan Aye Chon is unearthed from the rubble of a collapsed monastery in Mandalay after three hours of digging by rescue workers.
While she survived the quake, family members say she’s heartbroken that many of her friends who were with her died.
When the shaking started midday Friday, the girl ran out of the monastery, but then turned around to go back to try to rescue her friends. Then part of the structure fell and trapped her, family members said.
Video: Woman rescued from building in Naypyidaw after Myanmar earthquake.
In the capital, Naypyidaw, a 63-year-old woman was rescued from the rubble after being trapped for 91 hours, or nearly four days, Reuters reported.
Video showed orange uniform-clad rescuers in white helmets searching the partially collapsed remains of a building before the woman was carried out on a stretcher.
Reuters was able to confirm the location of the video as Naypyitaw from the buildings, the road layout and the entrance to the hospital, which matched satellite imagery of the area.
The date when the video was recorded could not be verified independently, Reuters said. However, a Myanmar Fire Services Department statement said the rescue took place on the morning of April 1.
Edited by Mat Pennington and Malcolm Foster
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Staff.
The Hong Kong Journalists’ Association is appealing to journalists to preserve Facebook live video footage of 2019 protests after Meta said it will start deleting archived videos from its servers.
There are concerns that much of the online footage of those protests, most of which is banned in the city amid an ongoing crackdown on dissent, will no longer be available to the general public.
That will make it easier for the authorities to impose their own narrative on events in the city’s recent history.
Facebook notified users last month that it will be deleting archived live video streams from June 5, while newly streamed live video will be deleted after 30 days from Feb. 19, 2025.
“Since the Hong Kong news media have relied heavily on Facebook Live for reporting in the past, the Journalists Association now calls on the heads of mainstream, independent and citizen media and online editors to back up their videos as soon as possible,” the Hong Kong Journalists Association said.
“If necessary, you can follow the platform’s instructions to apply for an extension to up to six months before deletion,” it said.
Capturing history
In one livestream still available on YouTube from Oct. 1, 2019, an out-of-breath protester collates video feeds from several sources on the ground, commenting on what is unfolding while sounding out of breath from “running” at a protest a minute earlier.
Meta’s webpage outlining their process to update Facebook Live videos.(Meta)
While one feed is run by protesters and the other by a professional journalist, both offer a sense of boots-on-the-ground immediacy that would be crucial for anyone seeking to learn what the protests were about many years later.
A reporter for an online media outlet who gave only the pseudonym Ken for fear of reprisals said a very large proportion of the public record of the 2019 protests was streamed live on Facebook, with more than 100 videos stored there.
While current media organizations have made backups, the footage will no longer be there for anyone to browse, making the record of that year less publicly available, Ken said.
“It’s like we’ve lost an online library,” he said. “Unless someone is willing to back it up and put it all online, there’ll be no way of finding that history any more, should you want to.”
Ken and his colleagues are concerned that online records of the 2019 could disappear entirely in a few years’ time, especially as republishing them from Hong Kong could render the user vulnerable to accusations of “glorifying” the protests, and prosecution under two national security laws.
Photographers document pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong, left, as he speaks at the police headquarters in Hong Kong, June 21, 2019.(VIncent Yu/AP)
“This is a very serious problem, because certain events or people may be completely forgotten about in a few years, maybe 10 years,” Ken said.
But there are risks attached to republishing video content — especially for residents of Hong Kong.
“You don’t know whether you will be accused of incitement if you post it again,” Ken said. “You never know what your live broadcast captured and whether there was issue … under the two national security laws.”
Permanent loss of historical material
A fellow journalist who gave only the pseudonym Mr. G for fear of reprisals said his media organization still has access to its own live streamed footage of the 2019 protests from both Facebook and YouTube.
But he said the planned deletions could lead to “the permanent loss of some historical material.”
Facebook said that the owners of the videos will receive an email or notification in advance “and can choose to download the videos, transfer them to the cloud, or convert them into reels short videos within 90 days.”
“If users need more time to process old videos, they can apply to postpone the deadline by 6 months,” it said, adding that most live video is viewed in the first few weeks after being uploaded.
Veteran media commentator To Yiu-ming said social media platforms aren’t suited for use as a historical archive.
“There’s no point criticizing them,” To said. “Users may well encounter similar practices even … if they move to another social media platform.”
“If you want to preserve the historical record, you have to use less convenient methods, and spend a bit of time and money,” he said.
The concerns over the deletion of live video come after a report claimed that Meta was willing to go to “extreme lengths” to censor content and shut down political dissent in a failed attempt to win the approval of the Chinese Communist Party and bring Facebook to millions of internet users in China.
Citing a whistleblower complaint by Sarah Wynn-Williams from the company’s China policy team, the Washington Post reported that Meta “so desperately wanted to enter the lucrative China market that it was willing to allow the ruling party to oversee all social media content appearing in the country and quash dissenting opinions.”
The notice in Chinese from Facebook warning users that archived live video will be deleted, Feb. 19, 2025.(Meta)
So it developed a censorship system for China in 2015 and planned to install a “chief editor” who would decide what content to remove and could shut down the entire site during times of “social unrest,” according to a copy of the 78-page complaint exclusively seen by The Washington Post.
Meta executives also “stonewalled and provided nonresponsive or misleading information” to investors and American regulators, the complaint said.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone told the paper that it was “no secret” the company was interested in operating in China.
“This was widely reported beginning a decade ago,” Stone was quoted as saying. “We ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we’d explored, which Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2019.”
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alice Yam for RFA Cantonese.
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Devastating forest fires have been ravaging Los Angeles and surrounding areas of California since January 7. So far, more than 25 lives have been lost in the catastrophe. More than 1,80,000 residents were forced to leave their homes and more than 12,000 buildings have been destroyed. Against this backdrop, several videos are going viral on social media including YouTube, in which it is being claimed that a mosque in the middle of the city remained safe in the grip of such a powerful forest fire, while everything else was destroyed.
A YouTube channel named Islamic Vibe uploaded a video on January 12, claiming that Masjid Al-Hikma in Los Angeles remained undamaged during the fire. The video alleges that the wind, which had been pushing flames toward the mosque, mysteriously changed direction, sparing the structure.
Similarly, YouTube channel Al-Fatahan also uploaded a similar video on January 12, claiming that while thousands of buildings were destroyed due to the devastation of the Los Angeles city fire, a Neural Imam mosque did not suffer any damage.
A YouTube channel named Discover Pakistan also uploaded a similar video claiming that all the buildings were destroyed in the fierce fire in Los Angeles city, while a Neural Imam Masjid was not damaged in which many people were offering prayers at that time.
Another YouTube channel called Islamic Survival posted a similar video on January 13, claiming that some people were taking shelter in a library amid the fires in Los Angeles. It claimed that eventually, the same library also got engulfed in the flames and everything was burnt to ashes. When a survivor who escaped from that fire later reached the library, he saw that everything there was burnt to ashes in such a devastating blaze that even iron structures had melted. However, it alleged that a single copy of the Quran remained untouched by the flames. According to the video, this miraculous event reportedly inspired several non-Muslims to convert to Islam.
Similarly, a number of other YouTube channels like Islamic Robes, Path to Jannah, etc. also posted videos with the same claim.
Fact Check
Frames from the viral video show skyscrapers on fire, while in one of these, skyscrapers in the entire city are shown burning. Flames can also be seen coming out of the upper parts of the buildings in the frames. There are many such frames in the video which clearly indicate that it has been created with the help of artificial intelligence. In reality, no such incident has happened and the images depict an entire city burning in some instances do not correspond to any actual locations in Los Angeles.
Alt News performed a keyword search using terms related to the incident on Google, the most used search engine in the United States. However, we did not find any news reports to corroborate that a certain mosque was left undamaged during a fire in the entire area. Nor was there any news which mentioned the incident in the library and stated that the entire library was burnt to ashes, but the Quran did not catch fire. Such an incident does not seem logically plausible either. When we searched about the mosques mentioned in the viral videos, we could not find any related news reports regarding a mosque named Al-Hikma or Neural Imam that have been published recently in the city of Los Angeles, nor could we find any information related to such mosques available on the Internet. However, several places of worship in Pasadena and Altadena were reported to have been destroyed in this fire, including Masjid Al-Taqwa.
It is worth noting that none of these contain any real image or videos related to the incident anywhere in it, nor has any official media report been cited here. All the videos and graphics have been created with the help of artificial intelligence, and the voiceover in all of them is also not a human voice, but a robotic voice. The one posted by YouTube channel Discover Pakistan is an exception in this case. This channel has created a report based on the AI-generated footage, in which a voiceover recorded by a human has been used.
Screenshots from these YouTube channels reveal a consistent use of sensational thumbnails and exaggerated headlines, created with the help of AI, to attract viewers. Many of the videos posted on these channels follow a similar pattern of fabricating stories around trending topics to gain millions of views.
To sum up, the slew of viral videos on YouTube claiming the miraculous survival of mosques and copies of the Quran during the Los Angeles fires are entirely fabricated. These videos were created with the help of AI. Since the incident is garnering widespread headlines at the moment, these edited videos were also amassing millions of views on social media.
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