A video shows a hot dog covered in dirt and parasites when observed under a microscope.
The hot dog clip was deliberately faked by the creator, who rubbed the sample on surfaces and clothing before putting it under a microscope. The worm-like organisms were not on the hot dog either.
A video showing dirt and worm-like organisms on a slice of hot dog sausage viewed under a microscope has been shared on Facebook.
The shots through the microscope seem to have been taken from a viral video originally posted to TikTok .
Reposts of this TikTok video have been shared by a number of different Facebook pages, including LADBible, which captioned a video featuring the hot dog clip alongside other videos from the same TikTok channel: “Who knew hot dogs looked so grim under a microscope”.
The creator of the original TikTok video, Roman Kamburov, whose channel regularly posts videos of various items placed under a microscope, told USA Today that the TikTok clip was “a deliberate fake”.
While the widely shared video doesn’t show this, in an earlier video Mr Kamburov revealed that he intentionally contaminated the hot dog slices by rubbing them on surfaces and his clothing before placing them under the microscope.
Mr Kamburov told USA Today he’d created the fake TikTok “to show that scientific and useful information is not as interesting as a fake [video].” He also explained that the parasites seen moving in the clip were actually worms moving in a petri dish.
Many of the posts shared on Facebook don’t provide this context. Furthermore, on TikTok, the video which clearly shows him contaminating the sausage, has received 3.2 million views, compared with the edited clip, which has been seen more than 244 million times on the platform.
Full Fact contacted Mr Kamburov to ask how the video was produced.
Image courtesy of Ball Park Brand
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because the posts don’t explain that the hot dog clip was deliberately faked by the creator, who rubbed the sample on surfaces and clothing before putting it under a microscope.
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