This video montage does not show footage of Hurricane Milton

Hurricane Milton killed at least 17 people and left nearly 2 million people without power in Florida. The storm also generated widespread media coverage, but some videos circulating on social media purporting to show Milton are suspect.

“Hurricane Milton is here,” reads an Oct. 9 Instagram video purporting to show footage of the storm.

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat fake news and misinformation on its feed. (Learn more about our partnership with Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

The first clip shows pieces of an apartment’s roof being torn off and flying through the air. But the images were not taken during Hurricane Milton, which hit west Florida on October 9. The video shows the rubble left by a July 15 tornado in Des Moines, Iowa.

The second clip also doesn’t show Hurricane Milton. It depicts an April 2022 tornado captured by security cameras in Andover, Kansas. We found the third and fourth clips posted to TikTok on November 30, 2023 and August 19, 2023, respectively, more than a year before Hurricane Milton hit Florida.

The fifth clip comes from a montage posted on October 8 to X and TikTok, a day before Hurricane Milton made landfall. The TikTok account that first posted the video has deleted it.

Screenshot from Instagram

A reverse image search showed us that the sixth clip shows Hurricane Helene from September 26, and the seventh clip from an X article from September 7 which says it shows overturned shipping containers in Vietnam due to winds of Typhoon Yagi, which hit the south. China and Southeast Asia in early September.

The following clip shows the roof of a house blowing off in São Paulo, Brazil, during heavy rains in October 2023. And the final clip was posted to TikTok on April 17, months before the appearance of the Hurricane Milton.

We believe the claim that this Instagram video shows footage of Hurricane Milton in Florida is false.