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  • 2017-04-26 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Evacuation Alarms Go Off in Pyongyang, North Korea Amid 'Nuke Fears'? (en)
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  • On 14 April 2017, the Daily Star, a British tabloid, reported a claim that North Korea had evacuated 600,000 residents of its capital city Pyongyang amid fears of a nuclear attack: The article contained a video posted to YouTube on 12 April 2017 by a user called Lazar with a caption stating: According to sources Pyongyang alarms went off due to mass evacuation of 600,000+ Pyongyang residents. To play up maximum fear, Pravda claimed the alleged evacuation was due to the fact that tensions between North Korea and the United States have been heightened in recent weeks over missile tests carried out by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, with the U.S. responding by sending a naval strike group to the region in a show of force: The sensational story then bounced around a number of disreputable web sites that picked up and further spread the false information. But the story appears to be nothing more than an item of classic fake news, fitting the pattern of a deliberately spread hoax. The video claiming to show an evacuation alarm in Pyongyang was actually taken in Valparaíso, Chile and originally posted to YouTube on 16 September 2015 — two years before the fake Pyongyang incident. The original video depicts a tsunami alarm after a massive 8.3-magnitude earthquake struck Chile. The quake was centered in Illapel, a small city about 3.5 hours' drive from Valparaíso, but rattled Chileans for miles around due to its strength. The authentic video can be seen here: Here is the same video from a different angle, posted on 25 September 2015: The claim that the video depicts an evacuation in Pyongyang that occurred in mid-April 2017 due to fears of a nuclear strike by the U.S. appear to have been drummed up solely to stir fear and anxiety. However, the stories utilize a video from the 2015 earthquake in Chile which appears to have been purposely misappropriated in order to create a fake story about a massive evacuation in North Korea. (en)
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