No, this isn’t a video of a Florida beach tornado in July 2024

A video shared July 7 on Facebook opens with an ominous black twister swirling along a coastline. The video then cuts to another such funnel cloud among palm trees and then a shot of people rushing through a store. 

Finally, the post shows video seemingly from a   car driving toward a huge storm that spits debris as lightning flashes. 

All of the footage apparently was shot in Florida that day. 

"Florida beach today tornado," the post said, using the hashtag #Miami.

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

Featured Fact-check

Threads posts

stated on October 26, 2024 in a Threads post

Four Florida counties had “zero results” Oct. 26, and “something underhanded might be happening.”

But there was no tornado in Miami on July 7. 

The National Weather Service reported cloudy skies and, briefly, light rain that day.

Across the country, only three tornadoes were reported July 7, according to the weather service’s storm prediction center, two in Texas and one in Colorado.

The first tornado clip has been online long before July 7. It appeared in another video compilation we fact-checked in April that purported to show flooding in Dubai. As we reported then, the video was posted online as early as January and looks as if it could be generated by artificial intelligence. 

The Facebook post’s second clip has also been used before, to purportedly show a tornado in Dubai on July 6, in Canada in March and Cuba in February. A reverse-image search for the clip of people running through a store turns up posts purporting to show fallout from tornadoes in California and Texas and from an earthquake in New York. 

We rate claims this video shows a Florida beach tornado July 7 False.