Was the "Hollywood" sign a casualty of the fires burning in Los Angeles County as of January 9, 2025? No, that's not true: When this fact check was written, the sign was "safe and secure," according to the organization that preserves the sign. Media supposedly showing the sign being on fire were likely generated through artificial intelligence or by simple photo manipulations such as the stacking of transparent images to add fire where there was none.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on January 9, 2025. The post included a video of what looked like a fire behind the historic Hollywood sign in Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles. The caption read:
The view of the Hollywood sign is wicked
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Jan 9 17:29:36 2025 UTC)
'Hollywood' sign is fine
Several widespread fires began burning in Los Angeles County on January 7, 2025 (archived here).
Lead Stories contacted the Hollywood Sign Trust, which maintains (archived here) the local historical monument (archived here). In an email sent to us on January 9, 2025, Jeff Zarrinnam, chair of the Hollywood Sign Trust (archived here), wrote that although Griffith Park, the area surrounding the sign, was temporarily closed, "the Sign itself is not affected and is secure."
Authentic videos, images could not be found
Lead Stories tried to use the AI detection tool TrueMedia.org to determine whether the post making the claim contained an AI-generated video. TrueMedia.org (archived here) reported that the results were "Uncertain." We used Google Lens to perform a reverse image search (archived here) of a screenshot of the video to see if it existed elsewhere online. We did not find a reliable source saying that the image is authentic, indicating that the video is probably fake.
Other social media posts made the same claim about the Hollywood sign and used different media to support the claim. We used TrueMedia.org to analyze the image used in this post (archived here), and the result was "Uncertain" (archived here). Similarly, we used TrueMedia.org again for the image in this post (archived here), and the result was "Uncertain" (archived here). We used Google Lens and performed reverse image searches of the images in the posts (here [archived here] and here [archived here], respectively). We did not find any credible results that pointed to the images being authentic.
Read more
Other Lead Stories fact checks on claims related to the Los Angeles County fires can be found here.
