As Cyclone Alfred approaches Australia’s east coast, incredible vision of wild winds and huge ocean swells has been flowing in through social media.
The vision, sometimes terrifying and perhaps a preview of what might come when the cyclone makes landfall, is generally shot by ordinary people with smartphones.
But the amateur nature of the videos opens the door for false footage to spread, with some online using it as an opportunity to generate clicks and clout.
ABC NEWS Verify has looked at some videos and claims that have spread as the cyclone nears and put together some advice on how to ensure you’re not getting fooled by false information.
1. Who is the source?
Before sharing that amazing clip you’re looking at, it pays to think about who posted it.
If the person who posted the footage is an ordinary citizen, do their profile and posts suggest they are in the disaster zone, or are they located thousands of kilometres away?
And what other kind of content are they sharing? If it’s all disaster content from various different locations, that might be a red flag.
This video contains various clips of high winds and destruction stitched together with the claim that they were all taken in Brisbane. The caption suggests the city weathered 220km/hour winds on March 5.
The account that posted it has only one other video, about a hailstorm in the UK, with multiple clips stitched together once again.
These kinds of accounts commonly surface during natural disasters and use old footage rebadged as new to draw eyeballs during a disaster.
All of this paints a picture of an unreliable source posting footage that should be ignored if you’re looking for genuine Cyclone Alfred content.
2. When was it posted?
Let’s take a look again at that video. How do we know for sure it’s old footage?
The video was posted on March 5, Australian time. A look at the Bureau of Meteorology website reveals that the maximum wind gust has not exceeded 44km/hr in Brisbane in March, or 39km/hr in February.
For context, this is far from what Geoscience Australia defines as a severe thunderstorm (90km/hr or greater wind gusts).
But to be sure that the footage it’s using is old, we can capture frames from the video and reverse image search them to find the original footage.
Using a Google Image reverse search, ABC NEWS Verify has determined the second clip in the video was posted almost a week ago from a different TikTok account.
We haven’t verified whether this was the original footage, but the account that posted it earlier claimed it was related to Cyclone Garance, which caused chaos recently in the French Indian Ocean territory of Reunion.
It’s a similar story for the clip below, which ABC NEWS Verify has seen being rebadged as Cyclone Alfred content in recent days, despite it being posted at least as early as January.
So, if the footage doesn’t match the weather for the time it claims to be recorded, or you can find it posted online before, you know what you’re looking at is a fake.
3. What’s the agenda of the person who posted it?
When you encounter incredible claims on social media, take a moment to consider if the person sharing the claim may have an ulterior motive.
Some social media platforms provide incentives for creators to post on their platforms via arrangements like X’s creator revenue program, which provides a slice of ad revenue to creators whose posts achieve a certain level of engagement.
It means some users might make claims that are aimed less at informing, and more at eliciting an emotional reaction to increase the chance their post goes viral.
For instance, we’ve seen a number of outlandish claims about Cyclone Alfred including that the cyclone is being directed by weather manipulation methods. Experts have debunked this time and time again as unscientific.
So, if you come across someone on social media making incredible claims like these about Cyclone Alfred, take a moment to check their posting history.
If they show a pattern of hyping up past disasters or making grandiose claims about hidden hands pulling the strings it’s a sign that they may be driven by personal agendas or are hoping to cash in on a slice of social media revenue generated by posts that go viral.
4. Has AI been involved?
With the continuous evolution of generative AI images and video there’s a growing chance that synthetic content claiming to relate to Cyclone Alfred could spread online.
Once again, the questions above also apply, but if you suspect the involvement of AI, you also need to ask yourself: does what I’m seeing or hearing make logical sense?
Take for example this AI-generated image of US President Donald Trump, which was circulating during hurricanes in the US last year.
Does it make sense that the event being depicted wasn’t reported by any major media organisation? At the time, Trump was a candidate for the presidency: if he had really rescued a child from a river, it likely would have been captured from several angles in video too.
And although these kinds of images may appear realistic there are some telltale signs of AI fakery that give them away like malformed hands and a too-perfect ‘AI sheen’.
So should you come across images on social media of federal politicians engaging in heroics, check if there’s other photos or videos to corroborate it from established news sources.
5. Beware of sharks
As always, if an image or video looks too good to be genuine, it probably is.
For many years, natural disasters like Cyclone Alfred have led to the proliferation of doctored images of sharks swimming in strange places.
These images have been debunked many times over, but it doesn’t stop them resurfacing when there’s a lot of water around.
If a shark were sighted in an urban setting it’s highly likely a mainstream media organisation would be alerted, so the absence of reporting on such an event should be your first red flag that it might be a fake.
As the tropical storm approaches, it’s a good reminder to check trusted sources before sharing that incredible image.
