This video of a hailstorm was filmed in Sydney, Australia, not France

This article is more than one year old.
Published on July 17, 2019 at 09:45
Updated on July 19, 2019 at 05:09
3 min read
By AFP Australia

A video of a hailstorm has been viewed tens of thousands of times in multiple posts on Facebook and YouTube, and included in several news reports, which claim it shows a hailstorm in France. The claim is false; the video was filmed in Sydney, Australia.

The 15 second video was shared in this Twitter post on July 7, 2019, where it has been viewed more than 17,000 times.

The caption of the French-language tweet translates to English as: “Hailstorms in France. Protect your cars”.

Below is a screenshot of the video:

The video has been included in several news reports about hail storms that hit south-central France in early July, including here on CNN Greece, here on Russian TV network RT and here on Indonesian news site Okezone News.

Here is an AFP report about the storms.

The claim is false; the video was shot in Sydney, Australia.

This Facebook post containing the video shows the Instagram ID @tors_ and a horizontal bar at the top which indicates it is an Instagram story.

The video was posted here during the week of December 24, 2018, on the Instagram stories archive of Instagram user @tors_.

Below is a screenshot of the video on Instagram:

Tori McPherson, owner of the @tors_ account, told AFP in an email dated 9 July, 2019, that she filmed the video in Bondi, an eastern suburb of Sydney, Australia.

Below is a screenshot of the email:

Paul Parks told AFP that he was the man seen in the video.

"The hail arrived suddenly but because I have a brewery in my garage (@BeachBeerBondi) I couldn't park it in there. I started to lay some boxes on the bonnet then got walloped in the noggin by an ice brick. I had to protect head so I put a box on and continued the task at hand.

"At the time i thought it might be a funny situation so I also setup my phone from the inside view. Check it out," he told AFP by email, providing this dropbox link to a video showing the same scene from inside his car and garage.

The same structures seen in the video in the misleading posts can also be seen on Google Street View here.

Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the misleading tweet (L) and Google Street View (R):

The video was posted originally shared on Instagram as hail storms hit Sydney in December 2018. This ABC News report published on December 21, 2018, gives details about the storm.

UPDATE: this story was updated 19/07/2019 to add comments and details from the man seen in misleading footage.

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