At the end of October 2025, a powerful tropical storm hit the Caribbean. Soon, many photos and videos allegedly taken in Jamaica and showing the scale of destruction went viral on the Internet. Some of them turned out to be fakes.
October 16, 2025 US National Hurricane Center reported about a tropical wave detected in the central Atlantic and moving towards the Caribbean Sea. October 21st classified like tropical storm Melissa, and on the 27th hurricane appropriated maximum fifth category. The next day, when Melissa was already very close to the Caribbean countries, the wind speed reached almost 300 km/h. As of November 3 known At least 32 deaths were reported in Jamaica, and casualties were also reported in Haiti. Cuba and in the Dominican Republic.
Destroyed hospital in Black River
Talking about the consequences of the hurricane in Jamaica, some Russian-language Telegram channels provide a photo showing damaged buildings and flooded streets. Sometimes in such publications TBCthat the photograph shows the city of Black River. This photo was posted by channels Mash (820,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), “Ax Live” (twice: 760,000 And 614,000), "RIA Novosti"(438,000), "Release Kraken Z!"(63,000), "Freshness"(45,000), 360.ru (25,000) and "Kryminforum 🇿 🇴 🇻"(10,000). The photo was also shared by English-speaking users. assertedthat it shows a destroyed hospital. Similar posts can be found in X, Facebook* And Instagram*.
Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness speaks to BBC News statedthat the city of Black River was "literally completely destroyed", catastrophic destruction confirm satellite images. “This is the worst experience of my life and I wouldn’t want to go through it again,” said an employee of the local hospital to Holness when he arrived to the city to assess the damage. The politician thanked the medical workers for continuing to provide care to patients even when the power went out and the hurricane winds blew out windows.
As shown in a video posted on Holness's social media, the hospital was not damaged or flooded as badly as in the viral photo. In addition, judging by satellite pictures, available on Google Maps, the layout of the Black River hospital looks different. The buildings themselves are also different from how they appear in the photo being circulated.
Fact checkers from the British project Full Fact analyzed viral photo using a reverse image search on Google and noticed a special note in the search results: “Created by Google AI.” A corporate spokesperson confirmed that the image contains SynthID is an invisible watermark added to content created using Google's artificial intelligence.
Some other fact checkers who checked the viral photo made a mistake in their analysis. So, our colleagues from the American project Lead Stories The publication time was set incorrectly one from the first tweets with this photo and made the false conclusion that the photo appeared on social networks several hours before the hurricane reached the coast of Jamaica. The same inaccuracy was made by Italian fact checkers from Facta and journalists from the French edition TF1 Info. However, all these projects also claim that the image was generated by neural networks. “Checked,” in turn, told Lead Stories about the mistake made, and it was corrected.
US National Hurricane Center reportedthat "Melissa" hit Jamaica on October 28 at about 20:00 Moscow time. The earliest post with a fake photo appeared on Facebook on the page of a user named Jomar Sombero within an hour after that (the post itself has already been deleted, the archived one has been preserved copy). The profile description reads: “Real Disasters • AI Illustrations • Global Awareness,” and the now-deleted post talks about a critical situation at Black River Hospital.
View from the window of a passenger plane
Also in the Russian-language segment of the Internet, a video allegedly filmed on board an airplane has spread, which was posted on the Telegram channel of the presenter of Channel One. Olesya Loseva (16,000 views) commented: “Look at what Hurricane Melissa looks like from above, moving towards Jamaica at a speed of 282 km/h. The footage is both fascinating and terrifying at the same time!” The same video was published by channels Mash (836,000 views), "RIA Novosti"(556,000, video later was replaced), AST-54 Black (88,000), "Release Kraken Z!"(63,000), "Kryminforum 🇿 🇴 🇻" (15,000), "Alexey Zheleznov"(14,000), etc. Similar posts also went viral on English, Spanish and other languages.
According to fact checkers from the project Snopes, this video was first published on October 26, 2025 - a couple of days before the hurricane reached the shores of Jamaica. Record posted use TikTok with the username @earthimpacts in his profile description it says: “Curiosity about AI disasters. Is it AI? Of course yes! You can find many similar videos on the @earthimpacts page; it also states that the blogger creates his own videos on the site openart.ai.
The video we are interested in has collected 7.3 million views on TikTok, although its description states: “This is not reality, but a simulation created using AI for a hypothetical scenario. The tornado was also created using AI.” In addition, the signature contains a tag about the use of a neural network and there is a special note from the platform about AI content.
As Snopes notes, citing data Flightradar24, 24 hours before Hurricane Melissa made landfall, commercial airliners were avoiding flights over Jamaica and surrounding areas. The few aircraft that entered the storm were special hurricane data collection vessels. You can find many genuine videos on the Internet, removed these so-called "Hurricane Hunters", including personnel flights through "Melissa".
Sharks in the hotel pool
Another video with the supposed consequences of a hurricane has become popular on the RuNet. Thus, in the Telegram channel of the presenter of Channel One Ruslana Ostashko (84,000 views) reported: footage of sharks that were thrown directly into the hotel pool by giant waves appeared on social networks. The same video was shared by the channels “Putin on Telegram"(158,000 views), Ura.ru (82,000), "Bullet"(65,000), "You can see in the video"(20,000), "Paragraph" (17,000), "Truthfulness"(15,000, post deleted), KP Moldova (4000), etc. Video gained millions of views outside the Russian-language segment of the Network.
In an eight-second recording that went viral on the RuNet, the voice of a woman speaking English can be heard: “Oh, my God! The whole ocean is outside. It's in Jamaica right now. The water rose right up to the hotel. Look: it’s a shark!” However, in posts in other languages, there is another version of the video, 15 seconds long, where the woman also says: “Oh no, there’s another [shark] over there.” I can’t believe it, the sea is coming, everything is flooded, the pool is gone...” In addition, the viral video was mirrored and cropped.
In some versions of the video, the username of the TikTok user is visible @yulian_studios. “Visual AI content creator in the Dominican Republic,” his profile description reads. At the time of writing this analysis, the video had already been deleted from the @yulian_studios blog, but a similar one was posted there record (deleted at the time of publication): A woman allegedly filmed a shark swimming through flooded streets in Jamaica. The video was accompanied by a special sign indicating that the author had marked it as AI content.
In the video being analyzed you can also find characteristic signs of the operation of a neural network. For example, the shape of one of the sharks' fins appears distorted, and some sun loungers near the pool remain motionless despite strong winds and waves. In addition, blurred areas are noticeable in the upper left and lower left corners, as well as in the right center of the video. Fact checkers from the Spanish project Newtral assumed, that these are artifacts of the work of AI, but in fact these three fragments coincide with the location of the Sora 2 watermark - a model for generating video from a text description from OpenAI. In many videos of @yulian_studios these watermarks present, but in several videos about Hurricane Melissa they for some reason covered up.
AFP fact-checking journalists analyzed audio track of a viral video using the Hiya detector, according to which the voice was generated by AI with a probability of 97%. Fact checkers also contacted the user @yulian_studios, who confirmed his authorship and explained: “Everything that is depicted there does not exist, since it was [created] by AI.”
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities and symbols are prohibited in Russia.
Cover photo: @weekendtraveler195 (Facebook) / @earthimpacts (TikTok) / @yulian_studios (TikTok) / collage “Verified”
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