What was claimed
A video includes footage of the recent accident in which footballers Diogo Jota and André Silva were killed.
Our verdict
False. This footage shows a fatal accident in Washington, US, in September 2023.
Footage of 2023 car accident in US falsely shared as Diogo Jota crash
A video shared on social media claims to show footage of a car accident that recently killed Liverpool forward, Diogo Jota, and his brother, André Silva. But the footage actually shows an accident that took place in the US in 2023.
The post (WARNING: distressing material) features four clips taken by traffic cameras showing a white car driving at high speeds down a road before skidding off the road sideways into a barrier. Overlaid text says: “Diego [sic] Jota Lamborghini accident footage”. The video ends with a photo of a burnt vehicle alongside a cropped image showing Jota with his wife and eldest son, as well as short clips of Jota on a football pitch in his Liverpool kit.
But these clips do not show the fatal accident that killed Jota and Silva, who played for Liverpool FC and Portuguese club Penafiel respectively, in northwestern Spain on 3 July.
The footage actually shows a fatal accident in Bellevue in the US state of Washington. Multiple US news organisations shared the footage in 2023 reporting on the crash of September that year which killed 27-year-old passenger Yabao Liu. According to local police, the white Porsche had been travelling at speeds in excess of 100mph at the time of the accident.
Moreover, the footballers were driving a green Lamborghini, not a white Porsche, when it veered off a highway and caught fire. The Lamborghini suffered a suspected tyre blowout when it crashed, and Diogo Jota was probably driving, according to local police.
The photo of a burnt car at the end of the video has a watermark for a local Spanish outlet, La Opinión de Zamora, which published the image in stories about the crash shortly after it happened.
Miscaptioned clips are a common form of misinformation we see online during breaking news events. We’ve written about another example of a clip being falsely connected to the crash but that similarly predates the footballers’ deaths.
It’s important to consider whether videos you see online show what they claim to be before sharing them. Our guides to identifying misleading videos and images offer some useful tips for verifying social media clips yourself.
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 false because this footage shows an accident that happened in September 2023 in the US.