The state of Texas is still dealing with the aftermath of a massive snow storm -- but many conspiracy theorists believe that it was all faked just to make the state look bad.
As The Independent reports, several viral videos on social media sites including TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook have been claiming that the storm that hit Texas was a hoax concocted by the federal government to undermine Texas's state sovereignty.
The conspiracy theorists have seized on the fact that snowballs they make do not instantly melt when they hold them up to cigarette lighters.
"This goes out to our government and Bill Gates," said one woman who filmed herself using a lighter to try and melt a snowball. "Thank you Bill Gates for trying to f*cking trick us that this is real snow!"
However, as PolitiFact notes, snowballs do not simply melt when they come into contact with lighters.
"Ice and snow have distinct physical properties, which leads them to react to heat differently," the fact-checking website writes. "Snow consists of frozen water droplets that have fallen to Earth. When snow is compressed into snowballs, there's a lot of space between the crystals, making them soft and porous."
This means that taking a lighter to a snowball will, in fact, leave a black burn mark on it -- and it certainly doesn't mean that the snow is a synthetic compound generated by Bill Gates.
Watch a video debunking the "synthetic snow" conspiracy theory below.