The “Meteorologists” Facebook page has 51,000 followers, an iffy grasp of grammar rules, and outsized confidence in the United States’ weather engineering capabilities. “They are Aiming this KILLER Monster Hurricane Right at FLORIDA!” one user said of Hurricane Milton on Sunday morning, shortly before sharing purported photos of dinosaurs living on Mars.
By Monday afternoon, Milton had strengthened into a Category 5 storm, and the internet conspiracies were intensifying, too. People shared videos of themselves asking their Alexas, “What kind of hurricane was Hurricane Milton?” and getting answers in the past tense — proof, surely, that the government orchestrated the whole storm. “Never ever seen a hurricane form in the western Gulf and head directly EAST… It is not right,” other users mused in the comment sections of their local weather channels. A search for “cloud seeding” on Facebook further turned up dozens of posts tracking flight paths for planes belonging to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and sharing photos of ominous-looking clouds as evidence that the “government is involved.”
Hoaxes and misinformation reliably follow extreme weather events. Pictures of Hurricane Shark have circulated on social media after pretty much every major flood since 2011, and a photoshopped image of a storm cell over the Statue of Liberty resurfaces anytime there is bad weather in New York. In the aftermath of a major disaster, it’s especially tempting for bad actors to exploit the desperation for news and images.
But Hurricane Helene — which devastated swaths of Florida up into the Appalachians just over a week ago — revealed how far this has spun out of control. For one thing, hoaxes are simpler than ever for the average person to disseminate, thanks to the availability of AI image-making tools and the degradation of content moderation on disaster-response platforms like Twitter. These conspiracies may also then be reinforced and amplified by people with an interest in making the government’s response look bad — such as the Republican candidate for president of the United States, a Georgia congressperson, and Elon Musk.
While some lies — like Deep State cloud seeding — are relatively easy to see through, many rumors are much more difficult to fact-check when power, cell service, and internet are limited. Nicole McNeill, the Asheville, North Carolina-based director of storytelling of Climate Power, told me she and many of her neighbors fell for a widespread rumor that a second storm was going to hit the western part of the state immediately after Helene. The panic the rumor sparked risked lives: She saw a fight break out in a gas line between two men who were frantically trying to get out of town, and a young couple who were renting a home nearby tried to flee and ended up on a road that was closed. “We heard later that people had to sleep in their cars,” McNeill told me. “Local police had to be diverted from emergency response to direct traffic to clear the roads so emergency vehicles could pass. Misinformation made a desperate situation worse.” McNeill herself suffered a panic attack while trying to fix the holes in her roof from trees that had fallen during Helene, all in preparation for the second storm that would never come.
While there was no merit to those manufactured claims, the truth is in some ways even more alarming: Milton is looking like a worst-case scenario storm as it bears down on Tampa Bay, and at this point, the only thing anyone can control is getting good information to the people whose lives will depend on hearing it. Forecasters are doing a great job of that already, like South Florida hurricane specialist John Morales, who let his emotions show on air and connected the storm’s intensification to climate science.
Milton isn’t due to make landfall until Wednesday, but the misinformation already circulating online will make it more challenging for early warnings from the government and local experts to be heard and trusted. That job doesn’t get any easier after a storm. To fellow hurricane survivors, McNeill warned, “If you have patchy internet and you’re at 30% battery and worried about your phone running out, you’re often making split-second decisions. That’s where misinformation gets people.”
