Photograph by Tamara Lichtenstein / Trunk Archive
WORDS BY AMAL AHMEd
In the week after Hurricane Helene dumped trillions of gallons of rain over North Carolina’s mountain towns, emergency responders hadn’t yet arrived in Calen Otto’s rural community outside of Asheville. Neither had the conspiracy theories, accusing government agencies of everything from creating the storm itself, to being on the verge of seizing people’s land.
That first week, Otto, a writer who’s lived in the region for six years, said that they and their neighbors didn’t have cell service, and the roads to town were completely blocked by fallen trees. “For a while, we were only talking person to person,” they said. Neighbors with chainsaws helped clear the road of fallen trees and made sure that people had what they needed. “We were checking on each other, saying Oh, you can get power here or water here.”
One of the first conspiracy theories that Otto saw when they returned to the internet was that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had run out of money for Helene recovery efforts because it spent it all on programs for “illegals.” The post was surprising to Otto because there’s a strong culture of mutual aid and support for marginalized groups in the area, they said, pointing to groups like BeLoved Asheville. But the post had taken on a life of its own after being amplified by conservative politicians.
“The conspiracy theories about the government causing the storm, that they controlled the clouds—that felt really ridiculous and insulting,” Otto said, particularly as they found their limited internet bandwidth littered with viral misinformation instead of information from local aid groups and government agencies.
In 2018, when Hurricane Florence slammed into the North Carolina coast, Otto doesn’t remember this level of misinformation and confusion. And experts say that the level of misinformation seen this fall after Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, which hit Florida a few days later, may be a new normal that communities and emergency managers have to contend with.
Samantha Montano, an emergency management professor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, watched in frustration as dangerous conspiracy theories spread across X—including the idea that FEMA workers should be killed for allegedly blocking aid.
“I’m worried about the long-term impacts to the profession [of emergency management],” Montano said. “These are hard jobs. They take you away from your family, you’re not paid very much—there’s not a lot of thanks in this job. To add concerns about security, of like, Are people online sending militias after us?, is another factor to pile onto an already difficult job.”
A few days after we spoke, the worst-case scenario unfolded: an armed man was arrested for making threats to FEMA employees. No one was harmed, but the threat led the agency to pause its efforts in certain areas and move its employees to a different area due to safety concerns.
Social media is the perfect breeding ground for viral conspiracy theories. More and more people are getting the news on these platforms, which have become echo chambers tainted by influential politicians with huge online megaphones. Growing public access to AI tools means that bad actors can quickly generate decently convincing deepfakes—and companies have made paltry attempts to crack down on such content.
“There’s an ongoing pattern across human history of seeking blame in disasters, and picking a scapegoat.”
But while the speed and virality of dangerous conspiracy theories are disturbing, we’ve always known that times of crisis spark information vacuums, said Sarah DeYoung, a professor at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center. “For example, there’s a myth that looting is prevalent in disasters, which isn’t the case most of the time—people are maybe taking items for survival,” she said. In the days after Hurricane Katrina, however, the myth became larger than life and, combined with racist beliefs, led to predominantly white neighborhoods setting up patrols that shot Black residents for fear of looting. “There’s an ongoing pattern across human history of seeking blame in disasters, and picking a scapegoat,” DeYoung said.
In other cases, bad information can stop people from seeking the help they need. In Houston, when Hurricane Harvey devastated the city in 2017, a false rumor that FEMA was checking IDs at shelters led families to stay away, even if their other options were unsafe or unsanitary housing conditions.
This time around, false ideas spread that FEMA was only giving people $750, or that the government might seize flooded-out properties. That could discourage people from applying for aid and receiving funds that they need to rebuild, Montano said. It’s too early to tell exactly how the theories may impact aid applications, but, Montano said, “It’s already so complicated for people to get the resources they need to recover.”
“There’s a kernel of truth that some people do not rebuild after disasters,” she added. “But it’s important to explain what the circumstances are.” Some people may take voluntary buyouts in a few years, and others may not have the money to fix a home if their insurance claims are denied.
FEMA did its best to quell the rumors—holding press conferences and creating a website that responded to some of the more vicious conspiracies. It’s had to do that before, too. Last year, after wildfires in Hawaii displaced thousands, internet bots began claiming that the government started the fires.
After Helene, local officials in North Carolina responded to the circulating falsehoods and urged people not to avoid seeking the help they need. The governor even chastised people for spreading lies.
Others on the ground stepped in, too. The Assembly reports that a North Carolina YouTuber named Mark Huneycutt hit the road after Helene, asking law enforcement and construction workers clearing the roads to help debunk the conspiracy theories—about looting and dead bodies piling up, for example. “I think because people can’t see what’s going on in here, someone created crazy stories and put it out there and it went viral,” Huneycutt said in his video, which has more than four million views.
Today’s technological age has helped prop up these false tales. In the aftermath of the hurricanes, AI-produced images spread across the internet. Some seemed harmless enough: a dog rescuing a child from a flood, for example. Another viral post misleadingly showed Disney World flooded out in Florida, and a costumed worker carrying a child through knee-high water. Conservative politicians, however, have shared such images as if they’re proof of the Biden administration’s failure to respond to the disasters.
In hurricane-struck communities, these conversations might still feel like they’re happening in a different world altogether.
Journalists have had to spend time debunking such images, Montano said, which takes time away from reporting on real issues. Another worry is that such images can open the door for sophisticated scams, DeYoung said. Fundraisers with AI-generated photos and text, for example, could just as easily go viral and crowd out legitimate organizations trying to help people on the ground.
With so much bad information floating around, it becomes harder to criticize FEMA and the government’s response to disasters. “We’re used to seeing frustrated survivors, and often FEMA workers themselves are frustrated with the process,” Montano said. “I critique FEMA all the time, there’s plenty to criticize,” she added, for example for not adequately addressing unequal recovery in communities of color and lower-income communities. “I’m worried the conversation is so polarized—either FEMA is perfect and great, so leave them alone… or we need to disband them and send in militias.”
In some ways, the viral sense of distrust in the government mirrors the deep-seated misinformation campaigns that took hold during the COVID-19 pandemic. “What’s interesting to me is that some folks who are susceptible to the anti-vaccination misinformation are similar to the group of folks susceptible to the idea that the government is creating chemtrails in the sky,” DeYoung said. It’s not a huge leap to then believe that the government created hurricanes before election season. “It actually makes people feel empowered—I’m in on a secret, and I can protect my family,” she said. “It makes you feel like you have more control of the hazards you might encounter.”
Misinformation experts warn that some of what’s online is coming from foreign bots, particularly since the disasters hit so close to a presidential election. “This seems to be a more systematic campaign than what has taken place after other natural disasters,” said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. In the future, more aggressive responses to misinformation may be needed, he said, even though conventional wisdom has held that repeating a rumor only serves to amplify it.
Sowing the seeds of mistrust, whoever might be doing it, plays into right-wing strategies. A major component of Project 2025, the manifesto for the next conservative presidency, would slash climate and environmental agencies’ budgets. For example, the 920-page tome suggests limiting and commercializing the hurricane modeling and forecasting work done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That’s the same agency conservative politicians have implied engineered Helene and Milton. FEMA’s aid programs, already stretched thin by mega-disasters, would shrink even more. “That political element isn’t going away,” Montano said.
But in hurricane-struck communities, these conversations might still feel like they’re happening in a different world altogether. Some towns are slowly recovering, with stores and gas stations up and running again, Otto said. Others are still full of debris. Otto knows that most of her neighbors, who helped each other through the storm, have guns. It’s impossible to think that any of them would turn their weapons on aid workers, they said, as happened this week. “I’ve only heard positive stories of people wanting to help people.”
And that, too, might point to another sphere of misinformation around disasters: From the outside, people assume that disasters breed chaos. Research actually shows that isn’t always true. “People slow down and engage in rational decision-making,” DeYoung said. But as things slowly return to normal and online discourse filters into the real world, it’s increasingly hard to tell what might happen next.
Join our membership community. Support our work, receive a complimentary subscription to Atmos Magazine, and more.
The Hurricane Conspiracies Made It Clear—We’re Going Climate Delulu
