False: A video from the 2023 Indonesia earthquake shows hikers falling.

Context

An earthquake of magnitude six struck northern Sumatra in Indonesia on January 9, 2023. Reuters quoted the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre, who said, "the quake was at a depth of 80 kilometers (49.70 miles)." Since then, some social media posts have misattributed dated videos and pictures to the 2023 Indonesia earthquake. 

On January 10, 2023, journalist Rahul Sisodia tweeted a video of hikers in a forest with the claim, "A powerful 7.7-magnitude #earthquake in #Indonesia was caught on camera." The footage showed four people standing in a forest while one person was filming them. In the video, the ground starts to shake, and the people being shot fall and scream. However, an analysis of the video has revealed that the video is not related to the 2023 Indonesia earthquake.

In Fact

Through a reverse image search, we found that the video was shot during an earthquake in Taiwan in September 2022. The video was shared by the Zhuoxi Township Mountaineering Association Facebook group on September 18, 2022. The caption, which is in Chinese, states, "At 1,000 meters of Zhuo xi Mountain, I was carrying out a workshop. While Gao Jianxiang was teaching, I encountered an earthquake and the sounds of the mountain. I could only reassure the students and lay down as far as possible on the ground(translated from Chinese)." 

Many YouTube clips have also posted the same video, stating that it was taken in Taiwan. Local news organizations like Taiwan News and EBC News also cited the original video in their reports when the earthquake occurred in 2022. 

Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau said that the quake's epicenter was in Taitung County and registered a preliminary magnitude of 6.8, the New York Times had reported. The epicenter was shallow at about six miles below the earth's surface, the United States Geological Survey said, meaning that there was a greater possibility of damage than a deeper earthquake.

The earthquake in Indonesia took place on January 16, 2023. According to Channel News Asia, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said: "The magnitude 6.2 earthquake was centered 48 kilometers south-east of Singkil, a coastal district in Aceh province at a depth of 37 kilometers." There are no reports of fatalities yet. 

The Verdict

Some social media posts have misattributed a video from an earthquake in Taiwan in 2022 to the recent one in Indonesia. Therefore, we have marked this claim as false.