Clickbait account misleadingly spreads old tornado clips on Facebook
- Published on July 19, 2024 at 21:27
- 4 min read
- By AFP USA
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"Strong tornado in Dallas USA," says the caption of a July 12, 2024 Facebook reel with #climatecrisis and #climatechange.
The video has accumulated hundreds of thousands of views.
The post comes after Hurricane Beryl hit Houston, Texas in early July, triggering tornado outbreaks in several US states (archived here).
But the record-breaking storm did not affect Dallas, according to reports from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (archived here).
"I can unequivocally confirm that no tornado of any sort affected Dallas on July 12th. This is absolutely false," Tom Bradshaw, a National Weather Service meteorologist in the Dallas-Fort Worth area (archived here), told AFP on July 17.
Bradshaw said the last time Dallas experienced a significant tornado was in October 2019.
Reverse image searches show the images in the Facebook post stem from previous weather events in other states and countries.
The first clip in the reel comes from footage of a tornado that hit Madill, Oklahoma in April 2020 (archived here).
Another segment shows a tornado filmed by an Andover, Kansas resident and posted on YouTube in June 2022 (archived here).
Storm chasers captured another clip in the Facebook reel featuring a tornado passing near a water tower in Pilger, Nebraska in 2014 (archived here).
While most clips in the reel were taken in the United States, one depicts a storm in Germany and was originally posted on X in May 2022 (archived here).
Another video captures a tornado damaging the roof of a house in North Carolina in July 2023 (archived here).
The Facebook page behind the reel frequently posts storm videos, compiling the same series of images as those in the Dallas clip and attributing them to different locations in the United States.
AFP has debunked other footage misrepresenting recent US weather events here.
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