This round-up of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s largest fact-checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information.
Hurricane Melissa videos
AI-generated video and false claims have been shared widely on social media after Hurricane Melissa swept across the Caribbean last week.
Full Fact has seen various misleading claims and misattributed imagery circulating on different platforms in the last few days, including:
– A viral clip shared on Facebook, X and Instagram which appears to show the eye of the hurricane filmed from a plane flying above it. This footage is not real, and was actually created using artificial intelligence.
– Social media posts claiming that Hurricane Melissa was caused by the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) research facility in Alaska. This is completely false. The hurricane was a natural event – the equipment used by HAARP is incapable of creating a hurricane.
– An image of a building missing a roof, shared with claims it shows Black River Hospital in Jamaica. The image is fake, and was almost certainly generated with AI. Real images of the hospital do not match the scene shared online, though it was reportedly damaged.
– A video compilation of 16 different clips supposedly showing Hurricane Melissa hitting Jamaica’s capital Kingston. Footage used in this compilation is old and from different parts of the world – we managed to trace 15 of the 16 clips, and found many have been online for months or even years.
We often see misleading posts circulating in the wake of major news events and natural disasters. Before sharing content on social media, it is always worth checking if it has been verified and comes from a trustworthy source. To help, Full Fact has a toolkit to identify bad information and guides to spotting AI images and videos.
Misleading claims about Muslims and council tax
Claims that Muslims are exempt from paying council tax if living areas within their home are used as a place of worship are circulating again on social media.
It is not true that Muslims, or members of any other religion, can avoid paying council tax on domestic properties altogether if a room is set aside for prayer.
Similar misleading claims have been spreading online for more than a decade, and we have spotted various such posts on Facebook and X in recent months.
One version of the claim included a screenshot of a line from a petition on the Parliament.uk website which says: “Muslims who use their living area’s within their homes as a place of Worship, are exempt from paying Council Tax (sic).”
The part of the petition making this claim, however, is not affiliated with the Houses of Parliament and was written by the individual who created it in 2013. This petition has a box at the top which warns readers that it has been “identified as misleading” and links to one of our previous fact checks on this subject.
The House of Commons Library says that such claims “have no basis in council tax law”. It said in a 2024 report: “It is not possible for owners of domestic property to avoid council tax by claiming that their property, or part of it, is used for religious purposes.”
The only exemption or discount related to religion set out in council tax law is for members of religious communities, “the principal occupation of which consists of prayer, contemplation, education, the relief of suffering”, with “no income or capital” of their own and who are “dependent on the community” to provide for their “material needs”. For example, some nuns may fall within this category.
Council tax is paid on homes, while non-domestic properties pay business rates.
Buildings registered for public religious worship or church halls may be exempt from business rates, though some parts of a religious premises may fall outside the exemption if they are not being used for worship.
According to the House of Commons Library: “It would be theoretically possible for part of a domestic property which was used for public religious purposes to be separately valued for business rates, and to be removed from the council tax valuation list.
“However, the VOA (the Valuation Office Agency, which is responsible for assessing properties for council tax in England and Wales) would have to be satisfied that this reflected the real use of the property. Such a change would be unlikely to make more than a minimal difference to the council tax bill on the remainder of the property.”
The Local Government Association and Gary Watson, chief executive of the Institute of Revenues, Rating & Valuation, both also told Full Fact the claims on social media about Muslims and council tax were not correct.
Central heating ‘ban’
Videos viewed tens of thousands of times on Facebook have falsely claimed the Government is banning people using central heating after 9pm.
The clips are styled to look like a news report about the supposed new policy, which is apparently being introduced for “energy efficiency” reasons. The voiceover says breaking this rule could incur “heavy fines”.
But these claims are false. No such ban is being introduced.
These videos form part of a spate of alarmist content being shared on social media making false claims about supposed new restrictions on personal freedoms. Our investigation into this trend in September found such videos had been shared more than 300,000 times, and led to TikTok banning 14 accounts – but we have seen many more videos shared since.
