Shaky social media video doesn’t show 8.0 magnitude Oregon earthquake

A social media video claims to show footage taken as an 8.0 magnitude earthquake hit Oregon’s coast — but on closer inspection, no one in the video seems to be affected by the temblor except the person holding the camera.

"Magnitude 8 earthquake hits Oregon coast…Help us," sticker text on a Nov. 1 Threads post said. The text included a praying hands emoji and the post’s caption mentioned a verse from the Bible’s Book of Revelation.

The 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, Instagram and Threads.)

The video in the Threads post was reshared from an Oct. 30 TikTok. It purports to show chaos as an earthquake violently shakes what appears to be a hotel. The TikTok user said it was filmed in Seaside, Oregon, a small, beachside resort town on the state’s northwest coast.

An earthquake struck off the southern Oregon coast that day, but it was 6.0 magnitude, not 8.0, Paul Laustsen, a United States Geological Survey spokesperson, told PolitiFact in an email.

Earthquakes are not uncommon in that region, so this one is likely not a sign of a biblical prophecy, as the Threads post’s caption says. Since 1924, there have been 44 earthquakes of magnitude 6 or higher in an area that includes Oregon, northern California and Washington, a USGS map shows. The largest was a magnitude 7.2 on June 14, 2005.

As of Nov. 8, 1,357 people had filed a "felt" report with the USGS about the Oct. 30 quake, meaning they felt the earthquake in their location. Three of those responses were from Seaside, a USGS map shows.

But Seaside city officials said they weren’t aware of any impact from the earthquake.

(Screenshot from Threads)

"I read that a 6.0 earthquake was reported off the southern Oregon coast that day. I'm not aware that it was felt here in Seaside," Mayor Steve Wright told PolitiFact.

City Manager Spencer Kyle said, "We did not feel anything in Seaside. I only learned about it in the news later."

There are clues that the video isn’t depicting what it says it is, starting with the hotel where it was filmed. We checked the City of Seaside Visitors Bureau website and found four listings for hotels, motels and resorts. 

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None looked like the hotel in the video, which appears to be at least four stories tall. Only one Seaside hotel — a Best Western Plus — was that tall, but it doesn’t match the one in the video. Nor does it feature an outdoor pool or interior courtyard like the one seen in the video.

Another clue the video is not showing earthquake footage is that none of the furniture or items in the room are shaking while the camera furiously shakes. Water bottles and a coffee pitcher remain still on a counter and lamps stay in place on bedside tables.

People can be seen relaxing in a pool, despite the supposed chaos around them.

When the person with the camera heads into the hotel’s walkway, we see trees unmoved by the supposed earthquake and a bag of luggage and "wet floor" sign that somehow don’t topple over as the ground supposedly moves around them.

Voices can be heard speaking Japanese and people calmly walk to the hotel lobby.

We rate the claim that this video shows an 8.0 magnitude earthquake in Oregon Pants on Fire!

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this fact-check.