Hurricane Milton: Conspiracy theories hamper disaster response and sow division

Claims proliferate that the government is controlling the weather and giving relief money to immigrants

Damage from Hurricane Milton in Bradenton Beach on Anna Maria Island, Florida. AP

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On the difficult road to recovery from devastating back-to-back Hurricanes Helene and Milton, US officials are also fighting a storm of misinformation.

Social media platforms have been deluged by outlandish claims from some right-wing commentators, who claim the mega storms were not fuelled by warming oceans but caused by the government as a way of stopping Republicans from voting in the November 5 presidential election.

Milton tore across the southern state of Florida from the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday morning, leaving millions without power and claiming at least 10 lives. This storm compounded the stress of natural disaster recovery as parts of the East Coast still are reeling from Helene, which hit only one week earlier.

Far-right Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has previously pushed QAnon conspiracy theories, has been chief among elected leaders to promote the false claims. She has claimed that an unidentified “they” are controlling the weather, and pointed to the practice of cloud seeding, which does not create monster storms systems like Helene and Milton.

Ms Greene has previously blamed wildfires on “Jewish space lasers”.

Cloud seeding conspiracies have surfaced before, including outside the US.

Questions about the practice gained traction after severe floods in Dubai this year. When asked if cloud seeding played a role in the Dubai floods, a meteorologist told the Associated Press, “when it comes to controlling individual rain storms, we are not anywhere close to that”.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned that anti-government conspiracies are “causing individuals, survivors not to approach the people who are there to help and obtain the relief to which they are entitled and that we have available to them”.

“That false information only is fuel for the criminal element to exploit individuals in positions of vulnerability,” he said at a Wednesday media briefing with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump has spread misinformation about the disaster response too, and Democrats say Republicans are using false claims to undermine Ms Harris and the Biden administration before the election.

“It is deeply concerning that one of our two major political parties is completely denying the fact that the storms are being made much more deadly, much more destructive because of climate change,” Stevie O'Hanlon, communication's director for the progressive climate advocacy group Sunrise Movement, told The National.

The conservative-led House of Representatives this year refused to grant the US disaster response agency, Fema, with its full funding request.

Republicans, Ms O'Hanlon said, “have left Fema year after year with a bare bones budget at a time when we need robust disaster response to save lives”.

Congress recently approved $20 billion for Fema disaster relief fund as part of a short-term funding bill to avoid a government shutdown, leaving out billions in requested supplemental disaster funding.

Despite this, Mr Trump has also touted false claims that the Biden administration is withholding Fema funds and giving it to undocumented migrants.

“The GREAT people of North Carolina are being stood up by Harris and Biden, who are giving almost all of the FEMA money to Illegal Migrants,” Mr Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Joshua Tucker, geopolitical risk adviser at Kroll and a politics professor at New York University, said the divided state of US politics makes the spread of such theories more likely.

“In such a highly polarised political climate, it is likely that a larger subset of people will be willing to accept misinformation as truth because they are more likely to view that information as 'political',” he told The National.

Mr Tucker, an expert on social media's impacts on political discourse, says people can be motivated to spread conspiracy theories for varying reasons.

“Some are probably doing it for economic reasons (to generate greater engagement with their posts); some likely for political reasons; and, especially sadly, some are probably just doing it because it feels like a fun way to get attention,” Mr Tucker told The National.

Alyssa Batchelor, a Democratic strategist focusing on party opposition tactics, says the only way to combat such claims is to “continue to repeat the truth”.

“Parroting and kind of creating lies and running rampant with these conspiracy theories is ultimately because he's not running a serious campaign,” she said.

The fact checks are not just coming from Democrats, though. Republicans in hurricane-hit areas are calling out the dangerous impact of misinformation and conspiracies.

Republican Representative Chuck Edwards in North Carolina called the claims “outrageous rumours” spread by “untrustworthy sources trying to spark chaos.”

“Nobody can control the weather,” he said. “Please make sure you are fact checking what you read online with a reputable source.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has otherwise aligned with Mr Trump, told reporters on Wednesday: “We live in an era where if you put out crap online you can get a lot of people to share it and you can monetise that. That’s just the way it is.

“But if you are hearing something that’s just outrageous – just know in the state of Florida none of that stuff would ever fly.”

In states like North Carolina, Fema has sent additional staff “because of the level of outreach and misinformation we're going to have to counter,” administrator Deanne Criswell said at a Wednesday briefing hours before Hurricane Milton hit Florida.

She added that the relief agency is “not going to let the misinformation be a distraction to the important work we need to do”./

President Biden on Wednesday called the conspiracy theories “off the wall, like a comic book.”

The White House is taking a new approach in their bid to combat disinformation, launching an official Reddit account aimed at keeping online followers informed about the fallout from the historic hurricane systems.

Ms Batchelor believes Democrats must think about “how do we communicate with people who might be predisposed” to these conspiracies.

A focus on how to navigate this, especially with respect to increasingly severe natural disasters, “is definitely going to have to play a role” in the future for political strategists, she told The National.

For the storms' survivors, the noise of conspiracy is detracting from a limited and precious resource: attention.

Anna Kovacs, a resident of hard-hit Asheville, North Carolina, emphasised that donations to the community are coming in strong now, but Americans need to stay focused on the immediate and long term needs at hand.

“To those outside the devastation area … this is a marathon not a sprint, we're going to need assistance for a long time to come,” she said. “I just don't think people are grasping that we didn't think something like this could happen to us.”