As Hurricane Milton edges towards the Florida coast, extraordinary vision of water spouts, lightning bolts, flooding and destruction is starting to emerge.
Some of this material often, filmed and shared by ordinary citizens, is terrifying and very real, but too many people online see weather disaster events like this as an opportunity to spread mis-and disinformation, fear and even political messaging.
It’s something we often also see here in Australia, with opportunistic types posting badly edited photos of sharks in flooded shopping centres and video of hailstorms that didn’t take place where people claimed.
ABC NEWS Verify has taken a look at a few videos circulating ahead of Hurricane Milton making landfall, and put together this advice around the basic steps you can take to make sure you aren’t being fooled by a fake.
1. What’s the source?
Stop and ask yourself if the person or outlet posting this piece of content is a trusted official body like a weather channel or news provider.
If they’re an ordinary citizen, take a look at other content they may have posted in the past – does it make sense for them to suddenly be in a disaster zone? Are they often sharing disaster content?
How does the person describe the content? If they’re making fantastical claims, attributing blame to shadowy unnamed figures and constantly using all caps, that’s the equivalent of screaming on the internet (for attention) and it’s a red flag.
Ordinary citizens are regularly the ones who film or photograph incredibly impactful content checked and then used by trusted news services around the world but it’s worth taking a second to ask yourself if the person sharing material seems legitimate.
This clip from TikTok is being shared widely but the account ‘Disaster World’ is simply one which mines views for money or clout.
If you look at other content from the account (some of which has more than 9-million views) you’ll see they regularly recycle the same dramatic screaming soundtrack playing in the background.
The clips that have been spliced together here are from previous disasters and also pop up over and over in this account’s videos. Put all that together? It’s a fake.
2. What is the agenda of the person posting about this?
In the online world attention is everything and tech platforms incentivise creators to compete for audience eyeballs by giving popular creators a slice of ad revenue through deals for creators such as X’s ad revenue sharing a program.
Monetisation programs have been highlighted as encouraging the spread of conspiracy theories through online grifters who regularly jump onto any major news event with their own hot takes and content. As with any major disaster alternative narratives emerge that frequently politicise events as they unfold. Georgia congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene for instance has implied recent hurricanes in the US occurred due to weather modification directed by unnamed forces. This month the Republican representative claimed “they can control the weather”, implying that the recent hurricanes were merely the latest instance of weather modification by unnamed shadowy forces.
She has since claimed that proof of this conspiracy resides with NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – relying on the fact that the government agency oversees commercial efforts to modify weather in the United States – a responsibility they outline on their website. Her claim, like many conspiracies, relies on a thin sliver of truth that has been extrapolated to make unfounded assertions. As NOAA’s website explains, weather modification efforts like cloud seeding for increasing local production of rain and snow have existed since the late 1940s.
But attributing these techniques to the ability to control hurricanes is one that has been dismissed by weather experts as bunkum. President Biden described claims the hurricanes were the result of intentional weather modification as "beyond ridiculous" and "stupid".
3. When was it posted?
This can be a really easy debunk technique: checking if the real-world timeline matches up with the content you’re looking at.
This video claiming Hurricane Milton has made landfall and showing clips of destructive winds has racked up thousands of views on TikTok and has been shared online since at least September 26, well before Hurricane Milton hit land in Florida.
If you want to go a step further, screenshotting material and doing a quick reverse image search though a tool like Google Lens can also help you see if an image or part of a video has existed online for a while and is old content being recontextualised to fool people.
4. Has AI been involved somehow?
Right now, most of the fake material we see online consists of what we call ‘cheapfakes’: real content that has been maliciously edited, recontextualised or altered in some way.
However as generative AI improves, deepfake-style material produced by artificial intelligence is something we’re going to see more of.
This AI-generated picture of former president Donald Trump has been doing the rounds since Hurricane Helene hit the US a few weeks ago, and no doubt we’re going to see more similar material in coming days.
There are a few telltale signs of an AI fake here – for starters, no other photos or moving vision exists to corroborate this purported event (and you can be sure someone would have been filming if it had actually occurred.)
The skin and hair of the two people have the classic AI sheen and Trump’s left hand appears to be disformed and slightly webbed.
Despite that, pictures like this have hundreds of thousands of likes and shares online from people who didn’t exercise any caution or scepticism.
So do yourself a favour and before you react to or repost something you’ve seen online, stop and ask yourself – does this make sense?
Editor's note (October 10, 2024): A previous version of this article stated that Marjorie Taylor Greene was a Florida congresswoman. Ms Greene represents a constituency in the state of Georgia.
