What was claimed
A video compilation shows recent footage from Hurricane Milton in Florida.
Our verdict
This is not true. All of the clips have been found to come from unrelated events, and one is a flipped CGI video.
‘Hurricane Milton’ video compilation shows older videos of other hurricanes
10 October 2024
A video compilation has been shared online with claims it shows tornadoes forming just before Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida on the evening of 9 October. The hurricane left nearly 3.4 million homes and businesses without power and destroyed thousands of properties.
Tornadoes caused by the hurricane did cause at least four deaths. But the compilation video circulating on social media is unrelated to recent events. Although many of the clips show hurricanes in Florida, none of them are of Hurricane Milton. The majority show older hurricanes or tornadoes in the region, and one is actually a CGI clip.
The original video was posted on TikTok, captioned: “October 9, 2024 - Two large tornado producing supercells are moving north in southern Florida right now. Before Hurricane Milton landfall Florida”. It has been shared more than 19,000 times on the platform and has also circulated on X, formerly Twitter, where one post has more than 1.9 million views. It has also been shared on Facebook.
The compilation is made up of eight clips: the first showing a tornado swirling above a field with some vehicles in it. But this video isn’t real. It is a flipped version of a CGI video of a tornado posted on YouTube in June.
The second clip shows a tornado near some sheds, and an explosion. But Full Fact found the video is actually from Andover, Kansas, in 2022 and has been miscaptioned before. The Mirror has included a screenshot from this clip in its reporting of Hurricane Milton. We have contacted the newspaper and will update this article if we receive a response.
The third clip of trees and debris being blown near a house is from Western New York in July this year, and the fourth clip showing extreme winds filmed from the porch is of a tornado in Georgia in 2022.
The fifth clip of a roof being blown away was posted before Hurricane Milton in 2023 and the sixth clip of extreme wind and rain is from at least August 2024.
The seventh clip, showing trees blowing in heavy wind and rain, is from Florida in 2022 and the eighth, depicting a petrol station falling over, is from Hurricane Idalia in 2023.
Misleading images and videos are a common form of misinformation we see circulating online during breaking news events.
We have created a guide with advice about how to verify that the videos you are seeing on social media show what they claim to.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as missing context because the clips in the compilation show hurricanes and tornadoes unrelated to Hurricane Milton, as well as one CGI clip.