ERBIL, Kurdistan - Rudaw Digital, the online platform of Rudaw Media Network, has set a new world record for the most-watched video on Facebook in 2026 - a deepfake debunking video that drew nearly 284 million views and rising in under 24 hours, making it the 8th most-watched video in Facebook history and surpassing entries from Bollywood. The milestone reflects a growing global audience turning to Rudaw for news verification and fact-checking.
What video?
The video at the center of the record went viral after appearing to show a terrifying highway near-miss in Egypt, when a truck's tires suddenly blew out mid-drive. The truck is seen tilting and careening out of control amid steady traffic, before a second truck driver raced in to shoulder the crippled vehicle, keeping it upright and stopping it from toppling into a crash that could have been fatal.
The one-minute-eight-second footage spread like wildfire across social media, with millions sharing it as a real, heart-stopping act of heroism.
What really happened?
In a genuine, unaltered video, vehicles maintain a consistent shape and size and don't transform into other objects. Movement follows the laws of physics - vehicles stay in their lanes, perspective shifts naturally, and camera motion matches filming from another moving vehicle. Textures on the tarp, tires and surrounding traffic also stay consistent as the camera passes, with no objects appearing or vanishing and no backgrounds disappearing between frames. Blurring, where present, is consistent with normal video compression or motion blur and not AI generation.
The video that went viral, however, showed clear signs of manipulation.
The writing on the back of the truck was incoherent, unreadable, and shifted shape rather than staying static. Early in the clip, a CAT logo on the right-hand truck abruptly changed into a ONE logo. After the tire blew out, two perfectly intact tires appeared on the road - unlike the original footage, which shows only debris.
Moreover, the license plates were also distorted, lacking readable letters or numbers, while fine details shifted slightly from frame to frame and surfaces like the truck body and road showed a telltale jitter.
These flaws reflect a known limitation of current AI video generators: convincing overall motion, but a struggle to render static text and fine detail accurately.
Rudaw Digital's investigation ultimately found the story was only half true. The dramatic tire blowout and the manner in which the truck tilted were, in fact, generated by Artificial Intelligence, while the second half of the video - showing a second driver stepping in to brace the wobbling truck and avert disaster - actually happened.
The record
In addition to grabbing hundreds of millions of views, Rudaw Digital's deepfake debunk became a hub for intense discussion, generating more than 159,000 comments and prompting over 284,000 shares on Facebook alone - a record not only within the Kurdish media landscape, but among digital media outlets worldwide.
Meta and other trusted tracking sources confirm that Rudaw's video is the most-watched Facebook video of 2026, ranking it among the top 10 most-viewed videos on the platform since Facebook's founding.
It also outpaced every other video in this year's top five, each trailing well behind its 280-million view count. In second place was a Godzilla vs. Kong movie clip shared by a Bollywood entertainment page, with 199 million views, followed by an art process video, which drew 180 million. Rounding out the list were an animal rescue compilation with 170 million views, a giant cheese wheel food preparation clip with 160 million, and a comedy prank compilation with 150 million.
On the all-time list of Facebook videos since the platform's 2004 launch, Rudaw’s deepfake debunk currently ranks 8th globally and is closing in on 7th place.
Why this matters?
When a video goes viral and reaches millions of views, few take the time to verify its authenticity. In many cases, media outlets focus on maximizing view counts without first confirming whether a video is fabricated, edited, or even recycled from an earlier event. This challenge has grown even more pressing in the age of AI.
Amid this noise, Rudaw Media Network, including its online platform Rudaw Digital, has made it a top priority to look beyond the surface of trending videos and uncover their hidden context, presenting the full picture its audience deserves to see.
As AI continues to reshape how content is created and consumed, the line between authentic footage and synthetic media grows increasingly difficult to distinguish - and the standards for how newsrooms should handle this shift remain far from settled.
Amid this uncertainty, Rudaw sees verification not as an occasional service but as a core editorial responsibility, one that will only grow more essential as AI-generated content becomes harder to detect and more deeply woven into the information people consume every day.
