Old weather advisory misleads Filipinos on the track of Super Typhoon Fung-wong
- Published on November 10, 2025 at 04:57
- 2 min read
- By Lucille SODIPE, AFP Philippines
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Typhoon Fung-wong slammed into the Philippines' largest island on the evening on November 9, contrary to social media posts falsely claiming the storm has deviated from its predicted track and is headed for China. An analysis of the purported storm track circulating on social media found it actually shows the path of Super Typhoon Ragasa that devastated swathes of Taiwan, Hong Kong and China in September.
"Thank you Lord, the storm deviated from its track," reads a TikTok post shared on November 6, which has been viewed 1.4 million times since.
The video shows the path of a storm mapped over an area of the Philippines and the Pacific Ocean.
A Tagalog-language narrator describes the storm as having changed its track, saying, "so you can see that the storm's path is moving up, it's now between Philippines and Taiwan".
The Philippines were still reeling from the impact of Typhoon Kalmaegi, which killed at least 204 people when it hit on November 2, when it suspended rescue work and began preemptive evacuations ahead of the arrival of Typhoon Fung-wong (archived link).
Locally named Uwan and with a footprint that spanned nearly the entirety of the archipelago, it slammed into the country's eastern seaboard on the evening of November 9 as a "super typhoon" after uprooting trees and swamping towns further south (archived link).
It weakened and departed the Philippines over the South China Sea on November 10, after its driving winds and heavy rain killed at least two people and forced more than a million to evacuate.
The video clip was widely shared elsewhere on TikTok and on Facebook.
But a closer inspection revealed the video clip shows the path of a previous storm, not Typhoon Fung-wong.
The storm seen on the circulating map is in fact labelled with the name "Ragasa", a super typhoon that grazed the northern tip of the Philippines before battering Taiwan, Hong Kong and China in late September (archived here and here). It was locally named "Nando".
The path shown in the social media clip corresponds to data on Super Typhoon Ragasa's predicted path from the Philippines' meteorological department (PAGASA) and the Japan Meteorological Agency (archived here and here).
Marco Polo Ibanez, a PAGASA research specialist, who was en route to Fung-wong's expected landfall location in Aurora province, told AFP on November 8 that the typhoon path shown in the TikTok clip is "definitely not" from the incoming storm.
"There is no deviation…[this video is] really misleading and can promote public complacency."
"Many content creators have no accountability when posting false info, and it ends up eroding public trust in PAGASA's official warnings."
Further keyword searches on Facebook found the video being used is from a two-month-old Facebook post (archived link).
It was first shared on September 20, when Typhoon Ragasa was near the Philippines. The Facebook account also posts similar clips showing the track of storms barreling toward the country.
AFP has debunked disinformation on storms that hit the Philippines.
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