KARACHI: Social media is rife with screen shots and posts predicting about the earthquake in India and Pakistan, just a day after the region of Turkey and Syria struck by powerful 7.8 earthquake that has claimed nearly 5000 lives till the filing of this report.
Some users also carried screen shots of the Dutch institution SSGEOS predicting an earthquake in South Asian countries including Pakistan, Afghanistan and India.
This resulted in thousands of people started panicking and forwarding the same posts to each other without even checking the authenticity of the content.
https://twitter.com/Pak_Weather/status/1622575461984247809
However, a fact-check exercise by MM News revealed that not only the claims were falsely attributed to Frank Hoogerbeets, the Dutch researcher who had predicted about Turkey quake 3 days ago, but it was also revealed that the name of Pakistan, India, or Afghanistan, or any other South Asian country didn’t exist on his Twitter timeline, or at the website of his institution, i.e. SSGEOS.
Please report this FAKE account @hogrbe_Official
— Frank Hoogerbeets (@hogrbe) February 6, 2023
Besides this, MM News couldn’t find the names of Pakistan, Afghanistan, India or any South Asian country as being predicted for the earthquake in the coming days, at any website recording or in some way predicting seismic activity.
