FALSE: Video of ‘young people died after drinking fake beer in China’

Claim: A group of young people in China supposedly died because of drinking fake beer, a viral video on Facebook claimed

The page Taxiuncle Group posted the video with the caption, “Fake beer in China killed a group of young drinkers who unknowingly had too many of it.”

The people in the video were unconscious and lying on chairs on a street. 

The 14-second video was shared more than 22,000 times and has garnered more than 8,000 reactions and 1,100 comments on Facebook. The claim was spotted through Facebook’s fact check tool Claim Check. 

Rating: FALSE

The facts: The people in the video were intoxicated, not dead, according to a Taiwan-based news channel that refuted the claim that the people consumed fake alcohol. 

Using Amnesty International’s YouTube DataViewer, a video verification tool, Rappler found online content that matches the video thumbnail. 

A reverse image search showed two different false claims that were attributed to the video. One said people supposedly died because of drinking fake wine in Dongguan, China. Another said they were poisoned after eating crayfish. 

Two official news reports from China debunked these rumors which initially circulated within Chinese social networking site Weibo. 

A news report by Shanghai-based daily newspaper Liberation Daily, translated to English through Google Translate, said 5 people were in a small lobster shop in Guangzhou past midnight on September 14. Three of them became unconscious because of drinking excessive liquor and beer.

All 5 were admitted to the Baiyun District Chinese Medicine Hospital and were found to be intoxicated. Only those unconscious were treated. Blood test results showed there were no abnormalities among those who were treated.

A separate report on SETN Sanli News Network, a Taiwan-based online news channel, said that the video was not taken in Dongguan and the people in the video were not drinking fake wine. They dismissed the claim as a “rumor.” 

According to the SETN Sanli News Network report, the video was originally circulated on the messaging app Line before it went viral on Weibo.

Facebook page Taxiuncle Group, which shared the claim, has around 12,000 followers. According to its “About” section, the page is a “community network for sharing info.” While it is not specifically described as a Filipino community, a number of comments on the alleged fake beer story were in Filipino. – Glenda Marie Castro/Rappler.com

Keep us aware of suspicious Facebook pages, groups, accounts, websites, articles, or photos in your network by contacting us at factcheck@rappler.com. Let us battle disinformation one Fact Check at a time.