Natural disasters are a rich mine of online misinformation, with content creators manipulating media or exploiting a lack of knowledge to make bogus and unverified claims.
From repurposed videos to conspiratorial claims, a mixture of public anxiety and limited understanding can help to create the perfect storm for misleading information about wild weather to catch fire.
In one example this week, a video that quickly caught the attention of social media showed what was described as lightning suddenly becoming liquid as it hit the ground, dubbed by those who shared it as a "glitch in the Matrix."
The Claim
A post on X, formerly Twitter, by user @ronin19217435, posted on November 20, 2023, and viewed 629,700 times, showed what appeared to be several branches of lightning hitting the center of a sports court and forming into a liquid pool.
A caption above the video read: "Glitch in the Matrix? Lightning suddenly gets liquid."
GLITCH IN MATRIX✅️
— nikola 3 (@ronin19217435) November 20, 2023
Lightning suddenly gets liquid👀👌 pic.twitter.com/IQWb6b2QKJ
The Facts
The term "glitch in the Matrix" is a reference from the Matrix film series, meaning an event or phenomenon that appears to defy logic or reality.
Lightning strikes can turn sand into liquid, which when cooled transforms into glassy tubes known as fulgurite. This, however, does not appear to be what is happening in the video.
According to the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, a lightning branch is plasma, considered the fourth state of matter, a superheated type of matter "so hot that the electrons are ripped away from the atoms forming an ionized gas."
It does not have a solid state of matter and so would not turn to liquid as seen in the video. In any case, the video is demonstrably bogus.
The lightning effect appears to have been created using video editing and CGI software; a pre-made effect pasted over existing, authentic photography or footage.
In the video, the lightning effect has not been placed particularly well. The scorching across the ground not only widens across the sports court in the center of the frame but on top of the fences closest to the camera, as if it were sitting on them.
There is also, noticeably, a tornado in the background of the frame that despite its size, matching the height of an adjacent tower block, does not cause any distress to surrounding infrastructure.
It is not immediately clear where the original footage, beneath the effect, was filmed.
Newsweek was able to trace the original footage to a TikTok posted on October 27, 2023, viewed more than 11 million times, by user @RTsarovVideo. The video posted here is of far higher quality and the digitally imposed effects are far clearer than the clip on X. Using a lower-quality upload of the video may have helped to convince others that the clip was authentic.
@RTsarovVideo's content, which has received 16.8 million likes, is described as a mixture of "Videos real & edited." Most of its videos appear to be footage from real-life storms and wild weather events, with quite clearly superimposed CGI and video editing effects laid on top.
The Ruling
False.
The video of "liquid lightning" is fake. Higher-quality versions of the clip show that the lightning branch effect has been sloppily laid over authentic, real-life footage.
The clip is thought to have been posted originally on TikTok by a video editor, whose content largely consists of genuine media spliced with computer-animated effects.
FACT CHECK BY Newsweek's Fact Check team
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
