A video showing a recent BBC report uncovering the hidden side of Maldives — full of disease-causing muck and mountains of garbage, is doing the rounds on social media. Many users have shared the video amidst the ongoing boycott of tourism to the Maldives.
A Facebook user posted the viral post with the following caption: *THE HIDDEN SIDE OF MALDIVES.* *MOUNTAINS AND MOUNTAINS OF* *DESEASE CAUSING MUCK 😱,*accumulated forever. This is BBC report.
You can check the post here.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile fact-checked the viral post, and found it to be misleading.
Running a Reverse Image Search of the video keyframes, the NM team spotted a news article on the official website of BBC News, dated May20, 2012, with a title: ‘Apocalyptic’ island of waste in the Maldives. The video matches exactly with the viral clip, indicating that it is not recent. The video is a documentary, by Simon Reeve, over a part of the Maldives that tourists do not see — an artificial island created in the 1990s as a landfill site to dispose of the Maldives’ waste.
He also posted pictures of the landfill site, also referred as “trash island” on his official Facebook handle from May 2012. This confirms that the documentary was shot in 2012, and has nothing to do with the ongoing India-Maldives conflict.
Therefore, we can conclusively say that the viral post, claiming to show a recent BBC report uncovering the hidden side of the Maldives, is misleading.
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