A Hurricane of Lies
Public servants have a second job now: countering conspiracy theories
An exhausted Bradley Boone, the assistant Fire Chief at Pensacola, took to Facebook on Saturday. As his community was recovering from Hurricane Helene he asked viewers for help. Not with aid or supplies. They had plenty of that for now. But to dispel the rumors that were making it harder for him to do his job. These rumors include that 150 people were missing, that the community was overrun with violence, that there were not sufficient food and water, that roads which were in reality in need of repair were being shut to limit the flow of help, and that FEMA was unwelcome. He said he had spent a large chunk of his day talking to citizens face-to-face to dispel the rumors.
"I’m trying to rescue my community. I ain’t got time. I ain’t got time to chase every Facebook rumor….We’ve been through enough."
Boone is an example of how emergency responders have become one more category of public service worker who have discovered that they now have a second job they did not sign up for. Alongside librarians, teachers, public health officials, election officials, and law enforcement, emergency responders must now also be misinformation experts. They have to spend their days separating facts from reality for constituents who are being lied to via right-wing conspiracy theorists.
FEMA set up a website to battle misinformation. Some of it comes from the usual suspects, like foreign adversaries such as Russia, seeking to sow mistrust, or professional conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones. But many of the lies (that FEMA is only offering $750 to disaster victims, running out of money, that FEMA money has gone overseas) comes directly from the people who could be in charge of the national disaster response next year.
JD Vance, Trump, and Fox News are key conveyers of the $750 lie. ($750 is intended to cover up-front costs, but citizens can apply for tens of thousands of dollars more in relief for property damage).
Trump said that Biden refused to talk to the Governor of Georgia, part of a pattern of discriminating against red states. But earlier in the day, Governor Kemp described the conversation he had with Biden the day before, and praised Biden’s support: “He offered that if there’s other things we need, just to call him directly, which — I appreciate that. But we’ve had FEMA embedded with us since a day or two before the storm hit in our state operations center in Atlanta; we’ve got a great relationship with them.” Other Republican leaders in affected areas have issued similar praise of the responsiveness of the administration.
Trump: “They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.” Yeah, this is also untrue. But fun fact: Trump raided the FEMA budget to redirect money towards his immigration policies, including building a wall.
The misinformation, and much worse, is coursing through social media because much of social media has given up on policing lies, and some social media (e.g., Truth Social, Elon Musk’s X) see a strategic advantage in lying about the disaster. This false post from Elon Musk was viewed 28 million times. No community notes.
Musk also claimed that FEMA was blocking the use of Starklink satellites, and that an anonymous SpaceX engineer had told him that FEMA was “actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own. It’s very real and scary how much they have taken control to stop people helping.” There is no evidence, apart from the word of Musk, that any of this happened.
There is a time that Twitter was the go-to site during an emergency. It was hard to compete with the immediacy of the information it could provide, combined with the critical mass of credible actors on the website. Twitter also used to moderate content to avoid misinformation. All of that is changed. Content moderation is thing of the past. Community notes are usually appended only after misinformation has gone viral, and often voted down on a site where the owner is fueling conspiracy theories.
An investigation found that 33 viral false claims about Hurricane Helene on X found that they racked up 159 million views. None were removed. Only three were appended with community notes. By contrast, FEMA’s 10 most popular posts on Helene received just 2.6 million views. Real information is overwhelmed by disinformation.
The disaster-conspiracy theories now on Twitter are cross-fertilized with the existing disinformation vectors on the site, which are far-right, anti-government, and racist. Majorie Taylor Greene, who previously suggested that “Jewish space lasers” caused forest fires says that the government is now controlling the weather to create the storms. Ten of the most viral Hurricane Helene tweets, receiving more than 17 million views, contained anti-semitic content. Senior DHS and FEMA officials who are Jewish have singled out for particular abuse, as has a Jewish Mayor of one of the affected cities.
We could be angry here about the hypocrisy. Trump says Biden does not want to deliver disaster aid to Republicans. Biden not wanting to visibly help swing states like Georgia and North Carolina, right before an election, doesn’t make much sense. But it fits with Trump’s own attitudes about disaster response. Multiple Trump aides say he was reluctant to allow FEMA support go to blue states. “One of his first questions would be: Are they my people?” according to a former aide, Stephanie Grisham.
But setting aside the hypocrisy, we should care because conspiracy theories affect the competence and quality of service delivery.
I used to do research on disaster response. One thing that was clear is how important it is to have a functional national crisis response agency, and how dependent the response is on human factors. FEMA itself is not a large organization: it organizes and relies on a broader network of responders, and on the trust of the public. Take that trust away, and their ability to help people collapses. Reliable real-time information is absolutely essential in helping people to make decisions to protect themselves and their families. As that information is degraded, people are more likely to make bad decisions. For example, someone worried that FEMA will steal their property is going to be less likely to evacuate, and more likely to be holding a weapon when they see first responders.
Competence really matters for disaster response like few other government functions. You can't bluff your way through it. You can’t learn the job as you go along. Mistakes are costly. Musk’s Cybertruck is on its fifth recall in the space of a year, while the boss spends his day on social media. His status as a natural disaster schmuck emerged when he promised to rescue a group of kids in Thailand stranded in a cave with a tiny submarine. When a cave diver who advised the successful rescue mocked the impracticality of Musk’s plan, Musk labeled him a pedophile, and hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on him.
Is this really the type of hare-brained, half-assed, thin-skinned narcissist we want leading the management of the federal government? Trump thinks so.
Emergency responders are being forced to redirect their attention away from helping people to dispelling lies. On the ground responders have to reassure victims that conspiracy theories are untrue.
Aaron Ellenburg, Rutherford County’s sheriff, has spent days refuting baseless claims about lithium sales or communities being bulldozed to cover up bodies left behind by the storm. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of this crap.”
If you find the mention of lithium puzzling, one of the conspiracy theories centers on the idea that the storm was engineered by the government in order to allow corporations to mine lithium in the affected areas. This rumor is prevalent enough that a North Carolina Congressman issued a press release to debunk falsehoods, which started with: “Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits…Nobody can control the weather.” It went on to reassure people that FEMA was not going to steal their property.
Laura Loomer, the conspiracy nutjob who accompanied Trump to his debate with Harris, and who has been touted as a Trump spokesperson in a second administration, urged victims to not cooperate with FEMA.
Emergency responders, as with many other public employees, now have to worry about their safety. A disturbing number of the lies about FEMA suggest that the only appropriate response is not just to disobey government directives, but also to target first responders with violence. The X comment below, again false, received more than 6 million views. It is typical of a strand of misinformation that suggests that FEMA is stealing resources from victims, or using the response to set up concentration camps, and then invokes the need for a militia (read: anyone with a gun) to respond.
Deanne Criswell, the head of FEMA, has said that the lies are not just “demoralizing” but creating “fear in our own employees.” Emergency responders are working long hours under demanding conditions. The last thing they need is to have to look over their shoulder, worrying that the people they are trying to help believe that they are actually there to hurt them.
Update to this story: the most predictable thing in the world happened. FEMA officials withdrew from parts of North Carolina after reports of threats of violence. A Forest Service employee helping to clear roads said it was about an even split between residents being “grateful to see us versus ‘go home feds.’ We were aware of the threats made against FEMA in particular, but federal responders in general.”
Read more at: https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2024-10-13/armed-militia-hurricane-helene-15497437.html
Source - Stars and Stripes
“FEMA has advised all federal responders Rutherford County, N.C., to stand down and evacuate the county immediately. The message stated that National Guard troops ‘had come across ... trucks of armed militia saying they were out hunting FEMA.’”
Read more at: https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2024-10-13/armed-militia-hurricane-helene-15497437.html
Source - Stars and Stripes
There is a basic asymmetry here. Democrats would certainly attack missteps by a GOP President failing in disaster response. The failure of Hurricane Katrina marked a key point in the decline of President Bush’s popularity. Trump was criticized for his sluggish response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and for pushing his appointees to violate scientific and ethical guidelines when releasing public information about the path of hurricanes to align with his Sharpie additions to a map. But that criticism was grounded in reality. Instead, the GOP simply turns to conspiracy theories rather than engaging in troublesome facts.
More climate-driven disasters are coming. This is the future. Trump won’t acknowledge or prepare for this reality. Indeed, Project 2025 has proposed that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration should be “broken up and downsized” because it is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”
Instead of facing reality about climate change worsening storms, Trump supporters are being told that the government is controlling the weather. Instead of looking at what emergency responders are actually doing, they are sharing fake AI-generated images to fuel outrage about Biden’s alleged failures, or reassure the public that Trump is there to save the day. The image on the left was shared millions of times, while the one the right was shared more than 164,000 times on Facebook alone.
Running a government is a serious business, and in the case of disaster response, a life-or-death business. We should support the people who are competent and committed to solving real problems, not force them to reallocate their time to knocking down misinformation. If we instead replace those people with those who view disasters primarily as a vehicle to feed conspiracy theories, count on much more human misery to follow.
PS: If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will have seen me write about the threats of Schedule F frequently for the last few years. I wrote an overview that focuses especially on the risks to democracy that Schedule F offers.
As always, well-written summary of the lies that are hurting real people. I'd like to make one observation though, which I read elsewhere. Instead of calling this misinformation, we should call it disinformation. Misinformation: “false information that is spread, regardless of whether there is intent to mislead.” Disinformation: “deliberately misleading or biased information; manipulated narrative or facts; propaganda.” (Dictionary.com) The vast majority of these lies are disinformation.
Don thank you for your thoughtful and needed analysis and evidence.