Social media users have falsely claimed that footage was captured of children dancing in a vehicle before a devastating school bus fire in Thailand killed 20 children and three teachers in October. The video was in fact made weeks before the tragedy and shows students from another school in the south of the country.
“Thai teachers and students just before the bus fire,” reads a Burmese-language text superimposed on a TikTok video shared on October 3, 2024, which has been viewed more than 499,000 times.
The 49-second clip shows schoolchildren in purple uniforms dancing in the aisle of a bus, while adults sit on either side.
The report emerged two days after a school bus caught fire on a highway near the Thai capital Bangkok, killing 23 people in what is believed to be the kingdom’s deadliest road accident in a decade (archived link).
The same excerpt has been circulating on social media, along with similar claims in several languages, including Burmese, Thai and English.
But in keyword searches, the original video was first shared online four days before the Oct. 1 bus fire.
AFP found the same video published on TikTok on September 26, 2024, alongside Thai-language captions reading: “September 13, 2024, students of Ban Thung Kwan Kaew School, Nakhon Si Thammarat Province, on field trip in Songkhla Province” (archived link).
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video shared in the fake posts (left) and the original TikTok video (right):
TikTok user Kanchana Chimthab told AFP that she is a parent of one of the students featured in the video and that she filmed the clip on September 13 during a field trip to Thailand’s southern Songkhla province.
“The clip has nothing to do with the bus fire,” she said.
A keyword search on Facebook also led to a press release posted on the school’s Facebook page with photos of the field trip, which showed students wearing the purple uniforms seen in the video (archived link).
Part of the press release says: “[Teachers of Ban Thung Kwan Kaew School] took students and parents on a field trip to Songkhla Province, visiting places such as Songkhla Zoo, Samila Beach and Wat Laem Pho on September 13, 2024.
The children who died in the bus fire were from Wat Khao Phraya Sangkharam school in the northern province of Uthai Thani, which wears orange uniforms (archived link).
AFP previously debunked disinformation regarding the school bus fire in Thailand here.
