TikTok disaster accounts use Texas flood fakes to boost engagement
On visual social platforms, AI is increasingly being used for compilation videos to illustrate the top stories
At least 81 people were confirmed dead in central Texas as of Monday morning after devastating flash flooding struck the state on Friday, the national holiday of July 4.
Several dozen people were still missing as rescue workers and civilians combed through the mountains of debris left in the wake of the deluge.
At least 28 children were among the dead — due in part to the total devastation of a riverside girls’ summer camp in the swift-rising waters. The death toll was expected to increase as authorities continued to find bodies beneath the swathes of branches and mud; 10 girls and a camp counsellor from Camp Mystic were still unaccounted for.
As Texans began to count the toll, there were more storms forecast in the next 24-48 hours. The search and rescue efforts have been further hampered by the number of snakes that travelled along in the torrent.
The natural disaster, like so many others, prompted a wave of social media content. Self-proclaimed news and disaster profiles on TikTok published compilations purporting to show the floods as they unfolded, many with newsreader-type voiceovers describing the situation.
But all was not as it seemed. While there was some very real and very dramatic footage emerging from the flooded communities, many videos required further inspection.
Insensitive AI-generated footage imagines plight of missing girls
One video posted to TikTok by an account called wordnewszz featured a compilation of flooding clips that began with a video of girls struggling in a fast-moving torrent of water. The video had racked up over 350,000 views a day after posting, while another video featuring the same clip posted later had accumulated over 126,000 views hours after posting.
Considering how fast the quality of AI-generated videos has developed in recent months, this was a crude effort and was easily recognisable as AI. The girls’ faces blurred and morphed during the short clip, and in several frames, there were pixels and soft blurring that resembled a painting.
Google’s AI watermark check tool, SynthID, confirmed the footage was not made with its generative platform, Veo. A closer inspection of the footage revealed a logo for Vidu AI in the bottom right corner. Vidu AI is a Chinese text-t0-video model.
Most people with a passing familiarity with AI would immediately know the footage was AI. But judging by the earnest comments, it cannot be assumed that everyone is so discerning.
While trained journalists and media professionals normally work with consideration of ethical guidelines, these same principles do not bind the creators of compilations online. As several commenters beneath the videos pointed out, taking advantage of such a tragedy with a distressing AI-generated video was cruel at a time when the fates of the victims were yet to be known. It is, after all, a highly sensitive time for the families waiting to hear news of their missing daughters.
The uploader account, which has not had such large engagement on most of its videos in the past, was clearly seeing results with the Texas videos. It kept going, with a total of four compilation videos featuring the same types of material posted up to early on July 7.
The latest was a story about two of the missing little girls being found alive, 27 feet high in a tree. The girls were depicted in the same blurry, cartoonish way. The similar nature of the video suggests it was generated on the same model as the previous clip, but the logo had been cropped out.
A Google search on the story revealed several articles from local and international news outlets about the rescue of two girls in a 30-foot tree in Comfort, Texas. The international outlets cited local news reports. However, a local newspaper, The Kerrville Daily Times, issued a correction late on July 6 after first reporting the story.
“PUBLISHER’S NOTE: We want to address something important and deeply disappointing. Earlier today, we shared a story about two girls being rescued from a tree. We’ve since learned that this story is not true. This has been incredibly difficult for our entire team. We take full responsibility and want to be as transparent and direct as possible,” the editor wrote.
Compilations claimed to be of July 4 include old and unrelated footage
It wasn’t just AI-generated content doing the rounds in the wake of the Texas floods. Real videos were also shared out of context and misrepresented to make it seem like they were filmed recently.
Also on TikTok, an account called storm.in.usa shared footage showing waters rushing past a window with a caption: “Flash Flooding in Kerrville, Central Point, Texas on July 4.” The video had been viewed almost 400,000 times at the time of writing.
The account, described in its bio as showing storms in the U.S., did not have many videos on its account, and featured an AI-generated image of a tornado as its profile picture.
A reverse image search on the widest angle seen in the footage quickly brought up previous examples of the video in use. It was widely used in news reports in 2019 about flooding that hit Dallas, with a courtesy to the homeowner Danielle Shermer. Here is an example from local news network WFAA, and it was also covered by the New York Post. It is also noticeable that the overlaid text incorrectly refers to the location as “Central Point”, rather than Center Point.
Another video posted by disasters_worlds that included dramatic disaster sound effects and music was viewed over 100,000 times. The account described itself in its bio: “Fastest and most accurate climate disaster updates.”
The compilation video, with a caption about the Texas floods, showed a series of clips including one of a bridge collapsing into powerful floodwaters. A reverse image search on a still from this video revealed it was in use long before July 4.
On Instagram, the same video was posted on June 30. On YouTube, it was found posted on June 29 with a caption saying that it showed Kalam, Swat, in Pakistan.
Some news reports from India also came up in the reverse image search results. This led us to search for news agency footage from a bridge collapse in northern India after heavy rains in 2022. The same bridge can be seen in this Reuters footage.
The same compilation on TikTok also featured some other clips that seemed out of place. A scene showing two trucks being carried down a street could be found in a BBC news report about 2015 flooding in Spain.
Even the first clip in that TikTok video was wrong. The footage showed a river bursting through barriers onto a pedestrian viewpoint, with people seen scattering. A reverse image search showed the video was posted on several occasions in 2024, meaning it is at least that old, with captions saying it showed the Qiantang River in China.
In some cases, the old clips were mixed in with what seemed to be real footage from these floods in Texas, making spotting the wrong clips harder for social media users.
Taking advantage of disasters to farm for engagement
Accounts dedicated to showing footage from disasters around the world are a growing genre on TikTok, and frequently appear in our fact-checks whenever there is either a natural disaster or a series of military strikes.
For these engagement-farming accounts, all that matters are the likes, comments and followers the videos generate. The truth of the content is treated as an irrelevant inconvenience.
Journalists working in visual media are all too aware that for some stories, there can be difficulties in obtaining verified footage from eyewitnesses inside a storm or a war zone, making the work of creating TV reports or news videos for social platforms difficult.
On visual platforms like TikTok, in cases where real current — or even real old — videos are in short supply, AI is increasingly being used by such disaster accounts to illustrate the top stories that are likely to entertain and shock a sympathetic audience turning to these platforms for their news.
SOURCES
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