Turns out the US government didn’t engineer Hurricane Milton to smash Florida last week. We know this because, as things stand, humans don’t have the ability to generate or control hurricanes. But we live in a world where such things must be clarified because social media has been awash with such conspiracy theories – this specific one amplified by a Republican congresswoman.
It is, I’m afraid, far from the only one. Here’s perhaps the most pernicious coming from Donald Trump, declaring at a rally in Michigan that the Biden administration slashed hurricane recovery budgets: “They stole the FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season”.
Illustration: Simon Letch
Here distilled is the essential Trump case in a single sentence. They’re crooks. Every issue is ultimately about “their” illegal immigrants. The election is being stolen (again). To this, Trump adds that devastated areas were left for days without help, and without helicopters being sent. All of which is demonstrably untrue.
Also demonstrable are the consequences. Meteorologists are facing death threats. FEMA says the misinformation is stopping people from seeking the help they need, thereby hampering recovery efforts. So thoroughgoing, so ruthless, so wild has politically driven misinformation become, that not even matters of life and death can deter it.
Recall, for instance, the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the immediate conspiracy theories that followed. For Trump loyalists, it was a deep state conspiracy to have the former president assassinated. For some who hate him, it was a false flag operation in which Trump staged this attempt as a campaign strategy. We might expect such things from online trolls, but in each of these cases they are coming from elected officials, Republican and Democrat. The poison has worked its way into the body politic’s organs. From there, it infects the bloodstream. More than a third of then-Biden voters, for instance, believed the July assassination attempt against Trump may have been staged.
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Witness the contagion; how once unleashed, misinformation becomes self-perpetuating. Until recently in American politics, it was almost exclusively a Trumpist phenomenon, produced systematically. Several studies between 2019 and 2021 found that right-wing online communities were disproportionately vulnerable to misinformation. But now we see it jumping political borders, even in the context of the hurricanes.
Take the social media falsehoods that accuse Trump of having a policy to end FEMA and provide zero federal help to disaster victims, despite the fact no such policy exists. I’ve interviewed a Democrat who told me, with no sense of exaggeration, that Trump’s policy is to take the vote away from black people and ban contraception. And then there’s the fake story (which began life as a joke) about Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance once having had sex with a couch being referenced with a wink and a nod by Kamala Harris’s team, her running mate Tim Walz and a slew of Democrats, repeatedly. Sure, it’s not quite stolen elections and Haitians eating cats and dogs, but all this represents a misinformational step change. No doubt the Democrats have a considerably milder case, but they now have symptoms of the same disease.
Are we immune? I write this a year to the week since the Voice referendum, in which disinformation became a prominent (if not decisive) feature. I write it also amid a Queensland election campaign in which the state’s electoral commission is being forced to fight all manner of untruths: that unvaccinated people will be barred from voting, or that the election is rigged due to the use of the same Dominion voting machines used in the US federal election in 2020. Of course, those voting machines didn’t rig anything – as a court case has since established. And we don’t even use voting machines in Australia, let alone Dominion ones.
