A month-long clip of the collapse of Bangkok skyscrapers emerges after Chiang Mai’s tremor
After recording a slight earthquake in northern Thailand on April 21, an old video was shared in a social media post that falsely claimed that the tremor had lowered a building. Local officials told AFP that no tremors damage the high-rise building. In fact, the video shows a catastrophic 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck Thailand and Myanmar a month ago, and skyscrapers collapsed.
“Today on April 21, 2025 – the building collapsed in Chiang Mai,” read more than 324,000 times in Thai texts that were superimposed on Facebook reels.
The video shows people messing around in the crowded streets, all messing up from the rolling dust clouds.
It was shared on April 21 in several northern Thai provinces, including Chiang Mai (including archived here and here).
Less than a month after the catastrophic 7.7-magnitude earthquake in neighboring Myanmar, the tremor was recorded less than a month, which also rocked the kingdom seriously on March 28 (a link to archive).
Screenshot of fake post, taken on April 22, 2025
Tiktok and YouTube and other languages such as Burmese and Khmer shared the same footage elsewhere and in a post taken on Chiang Mai on April 21.
However, Dusit Pongsapipat, head of natural disasters and mitigation measures in Chiang Mai, said the positions are selling “false information.”
“During the March 28 earthquake or April 21, there were no reports of any collapse of buildings,” he told AFP on April 23.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, residents generally do not feel low-speed tremors such as those recorded on April 21, or are not sufficient to cause any structural damage (archive link).
Keyword search led to a similar video posted on Tiktok on March 28, when construction skyscrapers in Bangkok collapsed After a magnitude 7.7 earthquake (archived here and here).
Tiktok videos have matching visuals and include tags that link the video to popular shopping districts in the Thai capital.
Screenshots compare the wrongly shared video (left) and the Tiktok video from March 28 (right) and highlight the corresponding elements by AFP
AFP has geography of the street shown in the video to a shopping mall in Bangkok where the high-rise building collapsed on March 28 (archive link).
Comparing the error-sharing video (left) from Bangkok (right) and screenshots of Google Street View Imager, its corresponding features are highlighted by AFP
AFP debunked other false claims related to the March 28 earthquake.
