Does a viral video of fires capture the aftermath of the June 9, 2026, anti-immigration protests in Belfast, Northern Ireland? No, that's not true: The recording showed explosions that same day on a gas pipeline in Russia's Dagestan. The original sound did not include any chants -- that was later digitally added to the version of the video that went viral.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X by @AmericanMama on June 9, 2026. It read:
The Irish are ready to burn the entire city of Belfast down to the ground over Sudanese migrants trying to behead native Irish people. I don't blame them for being upset. 👏 #Ireland
This is what the attached video looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @AmericanMama on X.com.)
The viral post, however, miscaptioned the clip. A reverse image search revealed that the recording showed explosions on a gas pipeline near the town of Kizilyurt in Russia's Dagestan. The same footage was posted (archived here) on Telegram by local authorities (archived here) on June 9, 2026, and the story was covered by several news agencies, including Reuters (archived here) and Russia's state-funded TASS (archived here).
(Image source: post by @kizilyrtraion on Telegram; the entry was automatically translated to English by Chrome.)
The version of the clip that went viral on social media was not the original one: That clip had been digitally altered. In it, the original natural sound of the scene was replaced with chanting to create a false impression that the video had something to do with violent anti-immigrant protests in Belfast (archived here), which also took place on June 9, 2026, in the aftermath of an attempted stabbing in that city.
Hiya, which is one of InVID's AI detection tools, suggested the sound might be AI-generated:
(Image source: Hiya.)
Another tool, Sightengine, that could only test the whole video, was more confident about the presence of generative AI in the clip. It showed the video was 98% likely to contain generative AI, but the results did not isolate whether the audio was the AI-generated component.
(Image source: Sightengine.)
