While Florida recovers from Hurricane Milton, the second dangerous storm to hit the U.S. Southeast in just a couple of weeks, a flood of misinformation threatens to compound the disasters. A major target of false claims is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the government body coordinating recovery efforts from Hurricanes Milton and Helene—the latter of which has killed at least 230 people since the storm made landfall in late September. FEMA has set up a debunking page because it faces so many harmful and inaccurate rumors. And in a telling example of how far things have gone, Representative Chuck Edwards of North Carolina, a Republican, had to dispel lies in a letter to his constituents this week: “Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock,” he wrote.
FEMA is not seizing anyone’s property. The agency did not prevent evacuations. Its grant programs generally don’t require repayment. FEMA’s disaster relief funds were not diverted to assist migrants at U.S. borders. Chimney Rock doesn’t have any lithium mines. Uncle Sam can’t control storms.
But conspiracy theories making such claims have spread swiftly—and with startling prominence. “What we’re seeing now is pretty unprecedented,” says Lisa Kaplan, chief executive of Alethea, a cybersecurity company that tracks the spread of false narratives online. Former president Donald Trump, tech tycoon Elon Musk and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia all have promoted lies or false theories about the hurricanes or disaster responses.
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“You always see misinformation after disasters,” says Lisa Fazio, an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University. “You don’t always see national political figures being the ones spreading that misinformation.”
Trump has repeated a torrent of baseless stories at rallies and on his social media platform, Truth Social. He has claimed, for instance, that the federal government has gone out of its way “to not help people in Republican areas” and that FEMA had no responders in North Carolina. FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell told CNN on Tuesday that Trump’s “accusations are just completely false,” pointing out there are some 3,400 workers from multiple federal agencies assisting with the state’s disaster response. “We have just got to stop this rhetoric,” Criswell said. She said she worried that people wouldn’t register with FEMA to get the help—including money—that is readily available to them. Misinformation that foments distrust can endanger responders, too, or at least make their job more difficult as they seek to keep people safe in the aftermath of deadly storms.
Why target FEMA?
Conspiracy theories about FEMA are about as old as the agency itself, which was founded in 1979. One early piece of misinformation from the 1980s claimed that FEMA would round up American patriots and place them in “detention camps” run by the agency. (The 1998 X-Files movie lampooned these fears, with Martin Landau’s character warning that FEMA had covered up an alien virus and was about to establish a totalitarian government.)
Craig Fugate, the agency’s administrator from 2009 to 2017, says that false rumors about FEMA are “not readily new” but “social media spreads them faster.” During his tenure, FEMA had to debunk rumors about 2012’s Superstorm Sandy—including fake reports that the agency was hiring people to clean up debris in New York State and New Jersey for $1,000 a week.
Attacks on the agency are the result of “a broader distrust in government,” Kaplan says, fueled by a “steady stream of disinformation over the years.” Those claims play into concerns about government overreach, a common right-wing bugbear. What’s more, misinformation studies from recent years indicate that American conservatives may be more susceptible to falsehoods than liberals. They are also more likely to be suspended from social media websites for sharing more low-quality news.
Why lie about a hurricane?
“Disasters are ripe for conspiracy theories because there is a lot of uncertainty as things are unfolding and a lot of fear,” says David G. Rand, a professor of management science and brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who also authored a recent study observing the asymmetry in social media suspensions between conservatives and liberals.
Misinformation offers a way for people to plug gaps of uncertainty with at least something. When communication systems go down, when family members can’t be contacted, when official responses haven’t yet been issued, rumors take root. And messages that appeal to emotion are particularly likely to spread virally, as Fazio and her colleagues document in a 2022 review of the reasons people believe misinformation. When “we’re trying to calm ourselves down,” Fazio says, we might seek reassurance by way of, say, a meme that captures our feelings. “People want to do something helpful,” Fazio says, and spreading misinformation that makes us feel a certain way can be a consequence of that urge.
By that same token, a fact-checking page such as FEMA’s can be useful as a legitimate source of information for people to share. But debunking has limits. “For some people, that will be enough to correct their beliefs,” Fazio says. “What debunks can’t do is fix these emotions.”
One post–Hurricane Helene picture viewed millions of times—an image of a tear-streaked girl holding a puppy in a flooded town—was made using artificial intelligence. When users of X, formerly Twitter, pointed this out to Amy Kremer, a Republican National Committee member who shared the AI image, she doubled down: “it doesn’t matter” where the picture came from, Kremer wrote on X, because it was “emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.”
In the face of deeply entrenched beliefs, can anything be done? Information scientists have largely moved beyond the idea that simply offering more facts can win over an audience. One concept that has emerged instead is “prebunking,” which is like building up the mind’s immunity to misinformation. This includes becoming familiar with common manipulation techniques and tactics. What also helps is knowing when to be extra vigilant about claims on social media—understanding, for instance, that falsehoods are more likely to spread during ongoing disasters.
Perhaps what’s missing, too, is a personalized touch. A study published in Science in September found that conversations with a custom AI chatbot, which the experimenters named DebunkBot, can tease some people out of their rabbit holes. Rand, also a co-author of that study, suggests this is an approach for FEMA to consider. “It would be easy to take such a chatbot, supply it with the information from the FEMA debunking page and set it out there to help correct people,” he says. (FEMA didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment from Scientific American.)
Can misinformation impede disaster responses?
Yes. After rumors of “antifa” arsonists spread amid wildfires in Oregon in 2020, civilian vigilantes, some armed, set up roadblocks to interrogate residents as they evacuated. At least three men accused of blocking roads were arrested. Now, in the wake of misinformation about FEMA and Hurricane Helene, there have been calls to send militias into North Carolina, too.
There is a tendency to “want to believe” that misinformation and rumors simply “live online and that these are just random people on Twitter posting things.... I don’t think that is true at all. What happens online can very easily move offline,” says Samantha Montano, an emergency management expert at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. “Even on our best day, when everyone is on the same page and working together well, it is incredibly complicated to respond to a disaster the size of Helene and now Milton,” she notes. Add misinformation to the mix, and responders have one more thing to address—and another threat to their safety and security in the field.
Falsehoods can endanger survivors even after a storm has passed. If misinformation convinces you that FEMA might seize your water-damaged home, “you may be less likely to leave while you are fixing it. That means you are going to be living in a home filled with mold. That is really dangerous,” Montano says. “The potential for impacts here, I think, is really significant.”