Mislabeled and manipulated videos of natural disasters go viral amidst recent hurricane activity

On the week of 15 October 2024, several different video montages of alleged tornado and hurricane footage went viral following the recent landfalls of hurricanes Helene and Milton. 

One such video has received 1.5 million views on Facebook and features a large tornado swirling behind a commercial parking lot. A label across the top of the video reads “Tornado in Florida, Hurricane Milton”. Another Facebook post went viral the same week and has over 29 million views; it shared the exact same footage flipped horizontally with a label that reads “Tornado in Dallas”. But there’s a problem: Dallas is in Texas, not Florida, and they are several states apart. So at least one of the labels is incorrect.

Another video gathered 18,000 interactions on Facebook with a label reading “The Sky in Florida Before Hurricane Milton Makes Landfall”. The video features a tornado swirling in the background while a nearby house has part of its roof torn off by strong winds.  

However, as social media users pointed out in the comment section, aspects of these videos – such as the tornadoes – look suspiciously computer-generated, either by artificial intelligence and/or visual-effects artists. 

Given the importance of accurate information and content in a time where hurricane misinformation is flooding the internet (recent reviews linked here and here), we will review several recent videos of alleged natural disasters to assess their legitimacy. 

Numerous recent videos are incorrectly labeled as ‘Hurricane Milton’ footage – instead they show unrelated storms and/or computer-generated imagery

While there is plenty of legitimate hurricane and storm footage following the recent impacts of hurricanes Helene and Milton, there is also a large surge of videos that leave many social media users questioning their legitimacy. As we explained above, two such videos have the same footage but are labeled with different locations in the United States that are over 1000 kilometers (640 miles) apart – not even in the same state. 

But which video came first? And are either of these videos labeled correctly? The answers to these questions are important because one video’s label suggests that the ‘tornado’ is related to Hurricane Milton – a topic already flooded by viral misinformation and accusations of weather manipulation (which we reviewed here and here). 

By taking screenshots of the video, we were able to identify the business names from the signs on the building, and used them to find the approximate location where the footage was shot (Figure 1). The footage appears to be from near Jacksonville Beach, Florida (as shown in the screenshot from Google Maps street view in Figure 2 below). This shows that the video labeled as ‘Dallas’ is incorrect, and that the video labeled as Florida at least has the correct location (i.e., state). But what about the legitimacy of the tornado footage and the suggestion that it is related to Hurricane Milton? We will investigate this below. 

After locating what appears to be the original footage (Figure 3) from 8 October 2016 (linked here) it is apparent that the more recent video is mislabeled and does not feature Hurricane Milton; it shows strong winds apparently recorded by storm chasers during Hurricane Matthew. Furthermore, in the original footage, there is no tornado; the video therefore appears to be manipulated using computer-generated imagery.

Another user posted a Facebook video labeled “The Sky in Florida Before Hurricane Milton Makes Landfall”, which features another suspicious-looking tornado swirling in the background while the house in the foreground has part of its roof torn off by stormy winds (Figure 4). However, after some investigation we found that the same footage (minus the ‘tornado’) was posted by ABC 13 News on 10 October 2018 – six years prior to Hurricane Milton. In fact, the original video identifies the storm as Hurricane Michael, and as we noted, does not feature a tornado, indicating it was added later.

Next up is a video montage on TikTok labeled “Hurricane Milton in Florida”, which features several different scenes ranging from stormy winds to an ominously massive, dark swirling storm behind a city (Figure 5). Given the striking size of the ‘storm’ shown in the video, we decided to further investigate. 

A reverse image search turned up another copy of this video originally posted on TikTok on 22 August 2024, and has since received over 300,000 likes. This alone shows that the storm shown is not Hurricane Milton, which made landfall in October 2024, nearly 2 months after the original video was posted. However, in the original video, the storm is unlabeled and – like the videos we’ve reviewed above – social media users in the comments were suspicious about the nature of this footage. One user commented “This CANT be real. Its AI.” Several other users shared similar comments that the video looks fake or created with artificial intelligence (AI).

Although this is not 100% verifiable, we analyzed the video using Hive’s deep-fake checker, which uses machine learning to determine the likelihood that content is AI-generated. The results showed a 94.9% likelihood that the video contains AI-generated content (Figure 6). 

While this assessment leaves a 5.1% likelihood that the content is not AI-generated or a deepfake, 94.9% likelihood is quite high. In addition, there are several visual peculiarities that give the impression of being generated by AI. For example, while the alleged ‘hurricane’ in the background is highly detailed with good definition, the buildings in the foreground – which appear to be much closer to the ‘recording device’ – are distorted, misshapen, and slightly warp as the video progresses (Figure 7). 

Regardless of whether this video was AI-generated, it was labeled as being related to Hurricane Milton, which is clearly not the case since the video was posted as early as August 2024, almost 2 months prior to Milton’s landfall. 

But artificial intelligence is also not the only method of creating fake or manipulated content. For example, a video was posted on TikTok (linked here) on 28 April 2022 – prior to the very recent advances and proliferation of AI-generated content – and was captioned “Tornado forming over new york city CAUGHT ON CAMERA”. This video received 3.9 million views and looks quite realistic to many users as reflected in their comments. 

The TikTok user (‘insanepatient2’) who posted this video did not explain that it was fake in the caption. In fact, the title suggests the complete opposite. However, they made it more apparent when they shared the same video on YouTube (linked here) with a description that they are a VFX artist and use VFX editing software. However, for those who don’t read the description, the title could easily mislead viewers into believing the video is real. 

Sure, it may seem benign to add tornadoes for ‘likes’ on social media, but using these quickly advancing technologies in this way further blurs the line between seems real or fake. And in a time of rampant misinformation, this only makes it more difficult to discern the truth. For these reasons, it is more important than ever to find reliable, accurate sources of information, follow scientific evidence, and double check what you see.  Recent footage is real and shows accurately-labeled natural disasters, such as tornadoes and storms that occurred from Hurricane Milton.

Conclusion

Following recent hurricane activity, misinformation about these storms has spread rapidly, with accusations about their causes and impacts. Following our recent reviews about ‘hurricane manipulation’, mislabeled and manipulated videos of alleged ‘hurricanes’ and ‘tornadoes’ have proliferated on social media. After investigation, we found that a number of these videos are recycled from older posts of unrelated events (e.g., past storms); some of them also show evidence of being AI-generated and/or edited using visual-effects software. For example, the label on one of the videos we reviewed suggests that it was recorded around the time of Hurricane Milton, which made landfall in October 2024; however, the original video appears to have been posted in 2018. The newer video features a large tornado and stormy winds, but the original video had no tornado. These details reveal that the video was mislabeled and manipulated to include a tornado that was not actually there. With advancing technologies – such as generative AI – and viral misinformation, it is more important than ever to find reliable, accurate sources of information, follow scientific evidence, and double check what you see.