Don't fall for these fake Facebook videos of Hurricane Irma, like millions of other people did
More breaking news, and another score of fake videos and Facebook Lives, attracting tens of millions of views.
The first example is this 30-second video which falsely claims to depict Hurricane Irma devastating the islands of Antigua and Barbuda in the Caribbean.
The video, which was shared on Facebook by Hendry Moya Duran, attracted more than 27 million views and more than 789,000 shares.
However, the footage he used is at least more than one year old, and it allegedly shows a tornado that hit Dolores, Uruguay, in May 2016, according to several comments on this YouTube video from that time.
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The Facebook video even tricked a meteorologist into believing it was actually from Irma.
Jamie Erle spotted it and re-shared it to her Facebook profile. She later updated the post saying: "I fell for it. This is NOT IRMA. This is old video. My sincerest apologies. I didn't inspect this carefully enough; thank you to those who did! Again, sorry!!!"
Someone also took the chance of using an old video, putting it on loop and uploading it to Facebook as a "Facebook Live" of Hurricane Irma.
It's an old trick but extremely effective.
The fake Irma video got more than 6 million views and more than 150,000 shares on the platform -- even from Facebook verified accounts like Carlos Trewher or popular ones like Conservative Today -- before being deleted.
A version of the fake Facebook Live, going on loop for 2 hours and 40 minutes, was posted on YouTube:
The original video is 3 minutes long and is at least 9 months old. According to this AccuWeather video, it shows a bus flipping over during Cyclone Vardah in India.
However, Facebook isn't the only platform hosting fake Irma videos.
One Instagram user posted a video, which he claimed to be from the Dutch Caribbean island of St Maarten, showing a five-storey building toppled over into a river under the impact of Hurricane Irma.
The footage actually comes from flooding in Tibet, China, in July, according to Chinese news website Sina. Storyful confirmed the location using eyewitness video published by Beijing Youth Daily and EBC showing the accident from different angles.
The hoax tricked The MailOnline into publishing -- then deleting -- the video:
Be careful out there.
Topics Facebook
