What was claimed
Planes hitting the Twin Towers did not cause their collapse in 2001.
Our verdict
This isn’t true, according to official investigations and independent experts. Two major reports concluded that the collapse of the buildings was due to structural damage caused by planes hitting them and resulting fires.
What was claimed
The BBC reported Building 7 had collapsed half an hour before it happened.
Our verdict
It’s true the BBC did mistakenly report that World Trade Center 7 had collapsed before it actually did, but this is not evidence of a conspiracy. The BBC has said this was a genuine error during live reporting.
Posts baselessly suggesting that the collapse of the Twin Towers was not caused by planes hitting them are recirculating on Facebook, 25 years on from the 9/11 attacks.
An image shared by posts on Facebook and X shows the North Tower under construction, with overlaid text that says: “If you really believe a little plane made this engineering marvel collapse twice you need to do some research.”
We’ve fact checked this claim before, and others have written about similar claims over the years.
Official investigations into the 9/11 attacks concluded that the collapse of the Twin Towers was caused by structural damage resulting from planes hitting the towers and the subsequent fires this caused.
A report conducted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) found that heat from fires caused by burning jet fuel “induced additional stresses into the damaged structural frames while simultaneously softening and weakening these frames” and that “this additional loading and the resulting damage were sufficient to induce the collapse of both structures”.
A second investigation conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that the collapse of the buildings “resulted from structural damage from direct and indirect effects of aircraft impact and the ensuing fires”.
Independent experts have also explained how the buildings collapsed as a result of structural damage.
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Inaccurate BBC report is not evidence of a conspiracy
A post we’ve seen sharing the image on Facebook also separately claims that “the BBC reported Building 7 had collapsed 20 minutes before it happened”. We’ve also fact checked similar claims about this before, where the suggestion has been that this proves the attacks were “scripted” or that the collapse of the towers was due to something other than a terrorist attack.
It is true that the BBC reported that World Trade Center 7—a 47-storey building located directly north of the main World Trade Center complex—had collapsed almost half an hour before it actually did. But as we’ve explained previously, this was a reporting error which the broadcaster has repeatedly addressed in the years since.
