No, the Government Didn’t Make Hurricane Milton. We All Did.
Reading Time: 4 minutesThe Leopards Are Eating the Hurricane Conspiracy Theorists’ Faces, With conspiracy theorists casting blame on everything from FEMA to the Weather Channel, post-hurricane recovery efforts face a new kind of storm: misinformation., Hurricane news: Hurricane
Thankfully for Floridians, the damage from Hurricane Milton wasn’t as severe as expected. That was due to a sudden weakening of the storm’s strength as it approached the shoreline as well as a slight shift in the storm’s path that mostly spared Tampa. But the impact has been quite extensive: A streak of tornadoes and floods powered by Milton has killed at least 16 people and displaced tens of thousands more; various parts of western Florida have been drenched with mud, while others are sifting through mountains of debris from torn-up infrastructure; more than 2 million residents still have no power; and the risk of contracting severe disease from bacteria lingering in Helen and Milton floodwaters remains high. All of this compounding the severe, lingering carnage from Hurricane Helene.
It’s in large part thanks to the efforts of meteorologists’ warnings and mass evacuation orders that Milton wasn’t more fatal than it was. But just because the worst-case scenario didn’t materialize, the same right-wingers who claimed last week that ‘they’ actually control the weather and that Democrats are denying aid to Republican survivors are already peddling fresh new conspiracies about Milton and its fallout.
For example, the fact that wind-speed forecasts changed as Milton barreled toward land means that the Weather Channel has lost all credibility, according to a right-wing social media influencer known as Catturd. (In reality, the Weather Channel accurately detailed the changing contours of an ever-morphing storm system.) Other shitposters shamelessly declared that Democrats had geoengineered Milton just in time to throw Florida’s election apparatus into chaos, and had also somehow directed the military to ignore Trump voters.
Fox News kept claiming that FEMA is granting disaster funds only to new immigrants and denying other survivors, even after one of its reporters hosted a segment on a congressional fact sheet debunking that conspiracy. As Milton approached, multiple weather forecasters told Rolling Stone about the conspiratorial questions that several people were messaging to them—and the death threats that followed, when these same inquirers accused them of manifesting the storms into being. Federal officials assisting Floridians with Hurricane Helene recovery and Milton preparation were subjected to antisemitic attacks from users on X. For both reporters and first responders, fending off misinformation, threats, and marauding influencers has become almost as time-consuming and urgent a task as anything else.
That state of affairs has impaired recovery efforts on the ground and harmed the very people who are actually supposed to be there. The assistant fire chief of Pensacola recorded a Facebook video last week to explain how rampant the disinformation had gotten, fostering a situation where he had to talk multiple city residents out of their unfounded assumptions. ‘I’m trying to rescue my community,’ he stated. ‘I ain’t got time to chase every Facebook rumor.’
Yet those social media posts can’t just be ignored either, especially when, as the New York Times reported, they’ve included ‘calls for residents to form militias to defend against FEMA staff members.’ Or when they include plans to destroy the very Doppler radars that scientists need to track these storms—because people think that that equipment is controlling the weather, not just detecting it. The nonsense all serves to distracts from real crises (like the factory workers and incarcerated people who were left in the way of the hurricanes) and real causes (the high-temperature waters in the Gulf of Mexico, supercharged by the changing climate of our carbon-choked atmosphere, were a key reason why both Helene and Milton were as strong as they were).
A lot of blame has fairly been directed at social media platforms. Elon Musk has allowed conspiracists (like himself) to flood X with lies. Facebook and Instagram have severely cut back on their content-moderation and misinformation-monitoring efforts. YouTube actively profits from its most bad-faith users, and ill-informed TikTok influencers command more space in the mediasphere than pretty much anybody else. The rapid information spread enabled by these apps allows for bullshit weather graphics, screenshots of random text threads, and A.I.-generated imagery to reach more people at a faster pace than was ever possible before. But the platforms are not autonomous actors in a vacuum—they’re inflamed by both conspiracy-addled figureheads and a mainstream media ecosystem that either covers for them or actively parrots their lies.
There was, of course, Donald Trump baselessly claiming that the Biden administration was holding up aid to Republicans—which is untrue, but also reflects something Trump had done as president, when he held up hurricane relief supplies to Puerto Rico. And yet, CNN chose to characterize Trump’s Helene responses as a ‘message of unity.’ The Wall Street Journal’s reporters have done excellent work explaining how white supremacist groups have infiltrated aid networks and how FEMA is debunking disinformation. Yet its editorial board has claimed the conspiracy-spewing Elon Musk deserves more credit for disaster mitigation than the federal government, and it ran an op-ed from J.D. Vance repeating the unfounded, bigoted talking point that FEMA prioritizes migrants over ‘Americans.’ Axios granted TikTok an unchallenged platform to claim that it was ‘proactively directing users to reliable information on the hurricanes from FEMA and aggressively enforcing its misinformation policies’—even as the actual landscape of TikTok’s hurricane coverage demonstrates the complete opposite.
Both left-wing and right-wing commentators supported the meritless claim that the government is prioritizing military aid to Israel and Ukraine over domestic support—even though the funding sources for each are completely different. (It is in fact obstruction from congressional Republicans that’s preventing FEMA from getting the additional resources it needs, but don’t expect to find that information while scrolling.)
This has all gotten to the point where even far-right figureheads who otherwise happily traffic in misinformation are encouraging others to tamp down their lies. Christina Pushaw, aide to the chronically dishonest Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is now warning against ‘engagement-baiting posts‘ that ‘make outlandish claims without evidence.’ Trump supporters representing Florida in the House of Representatives have said the White House is indeed helping folks in need and are still attacking FEMA even as they refuse to reconvene Congress and replenish its funds. It’s notable that the few conservatives who are pushing back on the nonsense hail from the states worst hit by the recent storms, like Chuck Edwards of North Carolina. Untrammeled dishonesty is all fun and games until it comes for you.
Of course, these very Republicans—along with their favored media outlets—have enabled rampant misinformation for decades now, and have attacked social media outlets for enforcing rules against it. If they’re horrified by the mess that’s resulted, they should realize that it’s one of their own making.
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