Does a video of a school ceiling collapsing show the effects of the earthquake that struck Morocco in September 2023? No, that's not true: The video circulating on social media has been manipulated and mislabelled; it actually shows footage of an American school in Mississippi being damaged by a tornado in March 2023.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published on TikTok on September 9, 2023, under the title, in Serbian:
Earthquake in Morocco last night.
Lead Stories staff also translated the hashtags beneath the video from Serbian to English as follows: "#notjoking #never #enjoy #notasecond #one #secondary #viral #tiktok #foryoupage #fyp #video #morocco #earthquake".
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Thu Sep 14 07:06:34 2023 UTC)
At the beginning of the video, the ceiling of a school corridor is shown collapsing with glass wool insulation and other debris falling to the ground. The video then continues, with debris lifting back up into the air and being spun around, which is not a typical phenomenon seen during an earthquake.
According to the US Geological Society:
The effects from earthquakes include ground shaking, surface faulting, ground failure, and less commonly, tsunamis.
The video is actually from the Amory High School in Mississippi, US, which was hit by a tornado on March 24, 2023. Lead Stories found the original clip through a search on YouTube, performed on September 14, 2023, using "tornado" and "school" and "ceiling" as keywords. The tornado struck the Mississippi school five and a half months before the recent Morocco earthquake, and it was more than 7,000 kilometers away from Morocco.
The TikTok video has been edited: It flipped the original video by 180 degrees on its Y-axis, which is why the classroom doors are on the right-hand side in the TikTok but appear on the left-hand side in the original video.
(Collage realized by Lead Stories on photojoiner.com on Sep 14 9:21 2023 UTC)
Another indication that the video has been manipulated is the banging sound continuing throughout the TikTok despite the earth no longer trembling.
The subsequent clips in the TikTok video do show the aftermath of the earthquake in Morocco. The clip at the 33-second mark can be also seen in this video by ABC News, while the clip at the 43- second mark can be seen in this video by WPLG Local 10 news network.
