The Hamsa Book · contents

The story

  1. 1The flood, and the videos that came after
  2. 2A triage desk, not an oracle
  3. 3One post, from a phone to a verdict

How it works

  1. 4Seeing footage before: three fingerprints
  2. 5Finding the evidence, in two languages
  3. 6Models propose, rules decide
  4. 7A memory, not a library
  5. 8Under the hood: one laptop, open models

The proof

  1. 9The numbers, and what went wrong
  2. 10What Hamsa does not do yet
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The story · Chapter 1

The flood, and the videos that came after

Why a fact-check desk in Nepal needed help, and the two observations Hamsa is built on.

Early on the morning of 26 August 2026, a wall of water came down the Bhotekoshi river in Rasuwa. Ice and rock had collapsed high up near the Tibetan border, and the flood swept through villages, hydropower camps, roads and homes. Within days the official count passed 900 dead, with thousands missing.

Within hours, social media filled with flood videos. Many were real. Many were not. A 2025 flash flood in India's Uttarakhand went round as "Bhotekoshi today". A glacier collapse filmed in Alaska became "the moment the glacier burst in Rasuwa". AI-made videos showed bridges folding into rivers and elephants carrying children to safety.

Sorting this out is the work of fact-checkers: Nepal Factcheck, Newschecker Nepal, TechPana, and abroad AFP, BOOM, Alt News and others. The Nepal Press Council's reporting portal received 101 complaints within days. Each one was traced by hand.

What "by hand" means

Watch a fact-checker work on one viral flood video and the same five steps come up every time:

  1. Work out the claim. The caption says "Bhotekoshi today", the on-screen text says "1,000+ missing". Which of those is being claimed?
  2. Check whether the footage has appeared before. Screenshot a few frames, paste them into a reverse image search, scroll through the results.
  3. Search for evidence: news from the right dates, official figures, fact-checks published elsewhere, often in another language.
  4. Write the verdict, in Nepali for the public and often in English too.
  5. Notice when it comes back next week, cropped differently, with a new caption.

None of these steps is hard. All of them are slow, and they repeat for every post. During a disaster that delay is when misinformation does the most damage: people share the fake while they are frightened, and the correction arrives after the fear has passed.

Two observations

  • Most disaster fakes are not new. They are old or foreign footage with a new caption. That can be proven: if the frames match a 2025 video from Uttarakhand, anyone can see both side by side.
  • The same fakes come back. One debunked clip reappears on TikTok, then Facebook, then X. A desk that remembers what it has checked never has to check it twice.