Is this viral video of flooding in Tunis authentic? Our frame-by-frame verification
The 47-second clip topped 800,000 views on X and TikTok in two days. Our Image–Caption Coherence and Edited Photo Detection analyses reconstructed the origin of every shot.
Screenshot of the viral video as it circulated on April 26 on X. Credit: "Tunisie en direct" account.
The video, first posted on Tuesday at 9:17 PM, shows submerged streets presented as filmed "tonight in Tunis." Within 90 minutes, the clip had been picked up by five pan-Arab accounts totaling 4.2 million followers. Our team began analysis at 10:04 PM.
What our modules found
- Image–Caption Coherence noted a 3,200 K luminance shift between shots 4–7 and the rest: the classic signature of nighttime archive footage re-injected into a daytime video.
- Edited Photo Detection isolated two added objects — a road sign and a pharmacy sign — overlaid on 2018 frames.
- The EXIF metadata was stripped on the viral version, but the version posted 16 minutes earlier by another account still carries a timestamp dated September 14, 2018.
- By contrast, two shots (8 and 11) are authentic and unpublished: they correspond to a local flood event that occurred this morning in Manouba.
How we established this
The Verify verification process combines a reverse image search (Yandex, TinEye, Google Lens) with our own visual analyses. For this video, the first archived match was found in 4 minutes via TinEye on frame 156. It pointed to a Mosaïque FM article published on September 15, 2018.
Once the source was identified, our analysts aligned each shot of the viral video with the original archive, shot by shot. Shots 8 and 11 produced no match: they were then submitted to AI-Generated Media Detection, which returned a confidence score > 92% in favor of authenticity.
The stakes go beyond this one case. Over the past seven days, Verify processed 421 user-flagged contents. 38% were marked as manipulated, 17% as out of context. The rest — the majority — is authentic: verification isn't just about debunking, it's also about confirming.
