This video has been circulating on X and TikTok and claims to show a village of men who have amputated their arms as dowry before marriage in a “centuries old” tradition to prove loyalty.The video, accompanied by a documentary-style voiceover making the above claims, seems to depict many male individuals without arms as they interact with their wives and participate in village life.  This claim has gone viral, garnering over 3 million views on TikTok and nearly a million on an X post, which further claims that the village is a violent matriarchy.

AI Generated?

However, despite the video being structured and presented as a factual documentary, we noticed that the voiceover contained suspicious hallmarks of being AI generated. For instance, the unmodulated, flat tone and similarity to other AI generated examples we have covered before. We then ran the audio from this clip though a free online tool to check for audio manipulation which flagged the voiceover as being AI generated. While the use of AI generated voiceover is not an immediate sign that the context is dubious, this did prompt us to look closer for more legitimate sources.

This version of the claim video that includes the voiceover seems to have first been uploaded to English-language social media by the TikTok account explore_the_world9988 on 10 February. Looking at their previous posts, this user appears to regularly post similarly formatted clips containing “fun facts” from across the world.

Initial Research

We were not able to find any other information or claims about the supposed arm-for-marriage tradition in Vietnam. Based on our detailed research, this does not seem to be something that occurs. And, the viral X post making this claim has recently been tagged with a community note which states that the video is a “hoax” and actually depicts an “amputee village in Cambodia.”However, our initial reverse Google image searches were not successful in finding the original source material for the video – nor did our research produce confirmation that the village shown was a Cambodian amputee village.

While there have been news reports and documentaries on communities in Cambodia depicting casualties of the Vietnam War and Cambodian civil war as they rebuild their communities, this particular claim clip does not seem to match up with those documentaries and reports. For one, most of the reporting (and even the linked source in the community note) appear to be from the early to mid 2000s, our visual assessment of the claim clip suggests that the footage was filmed more recently – for instance due to image quality and the fleeting presence of a smartphone in one of the clips). 

Digging Deeper

We expanded our search across other non-English language sources by pairing different screengrabs from the claim video with various search terms combinations (for instance “amputation” or “armless” or “marriage tradition”) in languages such as Vietnamese, Khmer and Chinese. We used both Google reverse search and Chinese-language platforms such as Douyin and Weibo.

We then found that a similar claim about arm amputation for marriage had been circulating on Chinese-language social media in December 2024 and January 2025, with the same source clips being used.Looking further, we saw that the claims were actually also debunked by Chinese fact-checkers on the same platform which, finally, led us to the original source footage on YouTube – two videos from a human-interest Vietnamese vlog channel covering unique stories. Likely owing to the language barrier and change in aspect ratio, these source videos did not surface through English-language searches despite being widely watched by Vietnamese viewers.Both videos were posted in December 2024.  One interviewed Vietnamese men from a mutual aid group comprised of members who have lost their arms, while another followed a couple navigating life after the husband lost three limbs in an accident. Based on translations of the video transcripts, there is no mention of any marriage tradition, nor do the individuals in the videos belong to the same village.  These source videos verify that the claim video is perpetuating a false narrative by misrepresenting unrelated clips and then layering a false voiceover over them with false information.

We therefore give this claim a rating of false. There is no evidence that any tradition exists where men must amputate limbs to get married – neither in Vietnamese culture, nor in any specific Vietnamese village.  The claim video comprises stolen footage and information that appears to be entirely fabricated.

This fact-check is an example of how difficult it can be to debunk false claims that leverage language barriers to spread misinformation. While large swathes of the internet landscape is in English, there are also significant portions which are not – which means that these portions cannot be discounted when doing through research as doing so could (like with community note on the X post) lead to incomplete or inaccurate fact-checking.

The challenge of verifying information across platforms (especially in different languages) highlights the need for cooperation and collaboration across fact-checking communities and organisations to optimise the fight against mis/disinformation.