Truth be Dammed: A year after Valencia floods, disinformation persists

Our study with Maldita.es reveals YouTube and TikTok amplified and failed to remove dis/misinformation about 2024 Valencia floods.

04-11-2025

Our investigation with Fundación Maldita.es revealed TikTok and YouTube’s failure to address dis/misinformation during and after the 2024 floods in Valencia, Spain (known locally as DANA), as well as algorithmic amplification of such videos.

We examined all videos posted about the event in the month after the floods, along with targeted sub-samples.

Key findings:

Climate dis/misinformation videos gained at least 13 million views on YouTube and 8.3 million on TikTok — likely more.
Such videos on YouTube averaged 21,250 views, nearly four times the platform average; on TikTok, 32,394.
On YouTube, they were 48% more likely to be liked and 123% more likely to be commented on; on TikTok, 85% more likely to be shared.
A year later, fewer than one in four YouTube videos with dis/misinformation had warnings; TikTok videos denying climate change remained unlabelled.

YouTube still lacks a dedicated policy, while TikTok fails to enforce its own. The study also highlights the urgent need for meaningful researcher access to data on algorithms to examine amplification and monetization.

Solution & Methodology

We analyzed all videos posted in the month after the floods, plus two sub-samples: one promoting narratives debunked by Fundación Maldita.es, and another of the 1,000 most-viewed dis/misinformation videos. Using keyword lists from Maldita.es, AI Forensics collected TikTok data (29 Oct–28 Nov 2024; 29 Jul–2 Sep 2025) and YouTube data (fall 2024; 26 Aug–2 Sep 2025) via APIs and scraping.

04-11-2025
La Vanguardia covers AI Forensics' report with Maldita.es, showing that climate dis/misinformation about the DANA floods remains online without labels a year later.