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Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger, and this is the On The Media midweek podcast. Right now, another devastating hurricane is aimed at the West Coast of Florida. But as we brace ourselves for Milton, officials and communities throughout the southeast are still responding to Helene, a storm that took over 200 lives, and caused billions of dollars of damage, all made worse by an unprecedented onslaught of misinformation, and politically expedient lies.

I called up Will Oremus, a Technology Reporter for The Washington Post, who's been documenting the spread of false information about the storm relief, especially in North Carolina. Will, welcome back to the show.

Will Oremus: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: To start off, can you just tick through some of the misinformation that's been put out there about FEMA, and about the disaster relief across the southeast right now?

Will Oremus: There is so much misinformation out there about what's going on with the hurricane Helene recovery effort, with the disasters themselves, with the preparations for Hurricane Milton, here are a few of the greatest hits. There have been claims that FEMA is running out of money to help Helene victims and survivors, because it spent the money helping migrants earlier, including illegal immigrants in the country.

There have been claims that, if you ask FEMA for assistance, they will give you a loan, but then if you can't pay it back, they'll seize your property. There have been rumors that government authorities were bulldozing the village of Chimney Rock, North Carolina, and there's different variants of this rumor. In some, they were doing it to hide the dead bodies.

In some, it was because they planned to seize the town. Maybe they were going to mine it for lithium. There was a rumor that a dam was about to burst, and hundreds of people were evacuated based on a false alarm. I mean, the list goes on.

Micah Loewinger: One post on X that was shared 17,000 times reads, "Reports are coming out of Appalachia of town hall meetings that it was indeed a land grab. People are being told they no longer own their homes, and they have to vacate immediately. No more help going in by civilians, or they will be arrested." There's no link to [chuckles] the town hall meeting in question. There's no community note. This stuff is just spreading like crazy.

Will Oremus: Yes, it's the old-- Many people are saying epistemology, right? You always got to be wary of those posts, where people say, "Oh, I'm hearing," or, "A friend told me," or, "There are reports on the ground." One of the problems here, among many, many problems, is that the big social media platforms, and especially X, actually disincentivize putting links in your posts these days.

Posts that are done without a link to an outside news source tend to travel further, and do better on the platform, and users recognize that. In a way, they're actually discouraging people from linking to information that could verify, or debunk the claims in these kinds of posts.

Micah Loewinger: I guess in that vacuum of pro social behaviors and credible sources on X and elsewhere, we're just seeing so many lies. One of those claims is that the government is only offering $750 of aid to people affected by Helene. This narrative has actually been popular on Fox News. It's been said by Donald Trump and JD Vance.

Donald Trump: What's happened there is very bad. They're offering them $750 to people whose homes have been washed away. Yet we send tens of billions of dollars to foreign countries that most people have never heard of.

Micah Loewinger: Just $750 of aid? That doesn't sound right.

Will Oremus: In this case, there is truth there. There is a video clip that has gone around of Kamala Harris saying to people, "We have $750 for you."

Kamala Harris: The federal relief and assistance that we have been providing has included FEMA providing $750 for folks who need immediate needs being met, such as food, baby formula, and the like. You can apply now for anyone who is watching this who has been affected.

Will Oremus: Yes, she did say that. The clip, typically, gets cut off at that point. What you don't hear is that, that is one of the many forms of aid that's available. That is the initial grant that people can get, if they've been affected, just to help with their immediate needs. There are much larger amounts of money they can get by applying for other sorts of aid.

There's a much greater pool of money from FEMA that is going in to support the relief efforts. Again, if you want to go viral on social media, or have a clip on Fox News that gets shared all around, cutting out that context makes it a pretty juicy clip.

Micah Loewinger: Let's talk about a really, really dumb one from Marjorie Taylor Greene, who posted a conspiracy theory on X over the weekend, claiming that the storm was maybe created by someone, and she wasn't talking about climate change. She said, "They can control the weather." She didn't specify who "they" are. After people started ridiculing her for this kind of Jewish space laser type conspiracy [chuckles] theory, she actually posted like a CBS segment from nine years ago about how physicists can use lasers to create lightning.

Speaker 4: They were talking about climate change yesterday. Now, we're learning that scientists and researchers are looking at how to change the weather on purpose. That's right. Lasers now could one day manipulate rain and lightning. CBS This Morning contributor--

Will Oremus: I do [chuckles] want to respond to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene was actually banned from Twitter. She's one of the many people that Elon Musk reinstated for better, or worse. She has built up a huge following on there. Her post was, "Yes, they can control the weather. It's ridiculous for anyone to lie, and say it can't be done."

You can find, if you really squint, you can find the grain of truth in there. There are technologies like cloud seeding where people are experimenting with ways to create rain to help with droughts. That is obviously not remotely what happened in Hurricane Helene. [chuckles]

Micah Loewinger: On Monday, Donald Trump lied about the government's storm relief efforts, saying that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp couldn't make contact with Joe Biden, which, of course, is not true, right?

Will Oremus: Right. Kemp was absolutely in contact with Joe Biden. I believe, Kemp came out and said that, "It's interesting, there's this disconnect between what some of the national Republican leaders are saying, both on TV, and in press releases, and on social media, and what the local Republican leaders are saying." I mean, for the most part, you hear local Republican leaders and state Republican leaders saying, "Look, can you guys just stop with this crap? We're trying to do a job here. We're trying to save people, and spreading these falsehoods is really not helping anybody."

Micah Loewinger: The people whose job it is to help people in their state, to help their neighbors, and those for whom this is an opportunity to sow division, and score cheap political points.

Will Oremus: Yes, exactly. I mean, and it's interesting, it's not just a partisan thing, because if you look on the local and state level, you've got Republicans and Democrats working together at all levels. These are states with very mixed populations. You've got leaders from both parties pitching in, working together. Then, if you look on X, or on social media, you would think that it's completely polarized, and that the Democrats and Republicans are entirely at odds over it.

Micah Loewinger: We've often discussed on this show how pieces of misinformation can be especially sticky, especially those that have some kind of kernel of truth at the center of it, that makes debunking, or clarification more difficult. One claim that I think exemplifies this phenomenon, and I've just seen over and over, not just on X, but also in right-wing media, is that after spending a ton of money aiding migrants, FEMA is now struggling to provide. Here's what Donald Trump said at a recent rally.

Donald Trump: They stole the FEMA 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. They're trying to get them on the voters' vote, we cannot let that happen.

Will Oremus: This is another one of those claims, where there is some truth there, but it's being taken out of context, and spun in a way that makes it basically untrue. FEMA has taken money, and allocated it to municipalities that were seeing large influxes of migrants, to help accommodate them, and to deal with that sudden influx of people in need.

There is an entirely separate pool of money that FEMA draws on when it provides aid in the wake of natural disasters like Helene. That money comes not from FEMA's operating budget, but it's allocated by Congress. That is an amount of money that FEMA has said in the past is not going to be enough. They want more of it, and not surprising. Every agency wants more money.

They're saying, "Look, this is not sufficient to respond to all the disasters that we have these days, especially with climate change." They were saying that before Helene came along. They are still saying it, but they're now having to be very careful, because this meme has spread that FEMA ran out of money, or doesn't have money to help American citizens because it spent that money on migrants, when in fact, again, they're two separate pots of money.

Micah Loewinger: Unfortunately, Elon Musk has promoted this very narrative calling FEMA's actions, "Treason".

Will Oremus: Treason's a word that's getting thrown around a lot these days by some of the conspiracy theorists. There's this narrative that FEMA and other federal officials are betraying the American people with their response to these disasters. Now, I have, based on history, there's no doubt that some of the agencies responding to a natural disaster are probably making mistakes along the way.

There are probably things wrong with what they're doing, but there's been no evidence to support anything like that kind of claim so far. Again, if you talk to the people who are close to the situation, you talk to the first responders, you talk to the local mayors of these towns that have been inundated, they will say, "Oh, no, we're working directly with FEMA. Thank goodness, they're helping. The money is flowing in. We're doing our best. It's a tough situation."

The narratives are all coming from this online conspiracy verse, which then overlaps with online media sources, TV, cable news, and becomes talking points for politicians at the national level.

Micah Loewinger: President Joe Biden signed a stopgap bill passed by Congress into law last week that contained an additional $16 billion for FEMA, but he suggested that's not going to be enough. Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson has said that, he won't call the House back before the November election, arguing that lawmakers couldn't assess the damage, or calculate the money they need before then, anyway. Help clarify this for me. Is it right to take away from this that FEMA doesn't have enough money to appropriately respond to Milton?

Will Oremus: This is one of the things that has made misinformation and rumors and confusion around this issue so prevalent is that, there really hasn't been perfectly clear communication on the question of how much money FEMA has, and whether it will be enough to respond to Milton from either party, Republican leaders, and also, I should say, right-wing influencers spinning this narrative that FEMA is all out of money, because it spent it on migrants.

Then, at the same time, you have Congressional Republicans like Speaker Johnson saying, "Oh, no, we don't need to reconvene Congress, because they have plenty of money. It's fine. Let's just see how things play out." When reporters have asked Johnson about the rationale for not reconvening Congress, at least, in the first reports I saw, he was referring them to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas' office, who, and Mayorkas has said that, they do have enough resources for Milton.

There was a press briefing by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, where she said, in one breath, "We do have enough money to respond to Milton," and then later said, "There will be a shortfall as we try to respond to Milton." There's a lot of confusion around this. I think-

Micah Loewinger: Yes, for real.

Will Oremus: -some of it is genuine, some of it is uncertainty. We still don't know how badly Florida will be hit by Milton. We didn't know in advance of Helene, certainly, how badly inland areas like parts of North Carolina would be devastated by Helene. You just don't know, and so, I think there is some validity to the idea that we actually don't know if FEMA has enough money or not. It depends on how everything unfolds.

Micah Loewinger: It's not just national officials under fire here. Some local officials have received direct attacks online, too, right? Including some that were blatantly antisemitic.

Will Oremus: Right. There's been this broader atmosphere of false rumors and half truths about the Helene response, but a surprisingly prevalent subset of that, particularly on Elon Musk's platform, X, is overtly antisemitic in nature. There have been posts going viral on X, where the idea that FEMA is seizing people's property, or that it's bulldozing towns, or that it's betraying American citizens is getting wrapped into this sort of deeper, more primal conspiracy theory about how Jews run the country, or run the world, and have secret plans that involve sacrificing normal Americans for some nebulous globalist aims.

One of the upshots of that, is that some of the officials who are involved in the Helene response, including the Mayor of Asheville, North Carolina, Esther Mannheimer, including FEMA's Director of Public Affairs, Jaclyn Rothenberg, have been the subject of really vicious and extremely antisemitic personal attacks. They told us that they're fearing for their safety.

Some of their staff are fearing for their safety, they're getting threats. This has happened mostly on X. We worked with researchers from a nonprofit called the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who did a report on this, and they found that because X no longer really sanctions people for hate speech, or for antisemitism, it has attracted all the virulent anti-Semites, and they've built a real ecosystem around these conspiratorial narratives.

Micah Loewinger: I want to ask you more about the human toll of these lies and conspiracy theories. Don Moynihan, who's a Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, recently wrote in his Substack about a man named Bradley Boone, who's the Assistant Fire Chief in Pensacola, Florida. He posted this video on Facebook, dispelling rumors about the disaster relief response in his area.

Bradley Boone: I think a lot of people have spread the rumor that there's 150 missing. Not true. Not true. Again, that is a falsehood. We have been on every road, we have knocked on every door, every place that I can-- That we can find on the map, or have ever been to. My family has been in Pensacola for 10 generations. I will not let this community down. There's the rumor going around that there's a lot of violence in Pensacola. No, that's not true. Not true. It's just as safe and secure as it ever was. We're fine.

Micah Loewinger: Moynihan wrote, "Alongside librarians, teachers, public health officials, election officials, and law enforcement, emergency responders must now also be misinformation experts." Will, I feel like this is part of a pattern that we're seeing emerge. The supposed villains are like evil Democrats or deep state whatevers, but the people who are most hurt are just regular public servants on the ground just trying to do their job.

Will Oremus: Yes. I can only imagine the frustration of people who are out there literally trying to save people's lives, save their homes, help them cope with this life-altering disaster, and then they hear that they're being demonized online. [chuckles] It's really dismaying.

Micah Loewinger: I know that FEMA, the Red Cross, other organizations have actually started putting out public statements, trying to dispel some of this misinformation. In the case of FEMA, putting up a new webpage aimed at countering lies. Is any of it working?

Will Oremus: Yes. Responding to misinformation has really become part of the task. Now, somebody at FEMA is doing this all day, trying to track what's the latest lie that's being spread about FEMA, and how can we respond to it, and get the truth out there. The reality is that, our information environment isn't well designed for debunkings.

I mean, there's been research over the years that shows that falsehoods will travel farther and faster on social media than the debunkings ever do. This nonprofit, ISD, in their report, tracked how many people were reached by 33 of the most viral falsehoods around Hurricane Helene. Then, we just, as a back of the envelope analysis, looked at, "Well, what about FEMA's own tweets? How many people are they reaching?"

FEMA's most popular tweets since Hurricane Helene have reached 50 times fewer people than the false rumors, so they're really fighting an uphill battle in this information environment. I think it also speaks to the fact that trust in mainstream media has eroded. You have agencies like FEMA that feel like they have to be their own advocates.

Micah Loewinger: Will, we're speaking on Tuesday. Tomorrow, Wednesday, the West Coast of Florida will likely be hit with another potentially destructive storm. Is there anything we can learn from the aftermath of Helene?

Will Oremus: That's a great question. I think it's a question that a lot of agencies are asking themselves right now. One thing that could actually make it worse in this case is, the people that we really worry about when it comes to having their lives meaningfully affected by these falsehoods, are the people who are in the disaster zone. It's the people who need correct information about where to evacuate, when to evacuate, who to turn to for help?

Some swath of those people who are going to be devastated by Milton, now are going into it with the belief that FEMA is not on their side, and that's potentially really dangerous. At the same time, I think the political atmosphere might be a little different, because Florida has a very high profile Republican Governor, Ron DeSantis. Not to say all, but the preponderance of falsehoods around the Helene recovery has been coming from the right.

That might be a little different with DeSantis being the Governor of Florida. Misinformation has been a feature of every major social media platform since social media existed, but when you talk to experts on misinformation, and also on disaster response, a lot of them are saying, "This is the worst it's ever been." A big part of that seems to be driven by the falsehoods that are going viral on X.

The public agencies, the first responders, and as you mentioned, the media whose job is to try to communicate factual information, the dilemma they face is, there are still more people on X than on any of these alternatives, so if your goal is to reach people, maybe you have to go where those people are, even if you have to hold your nose, and wade through a bunch of falsehoods, and antisemitism while you're on there, in order to do it. Certainly, we are seeing alternatives to X gaining traction, partly as a result of the widespread anger at how Musk has been running it.

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Micah Loewinger: Will, thank you very much.

Will Oremus: Thanks, Micah.

Micah Loewinger: Will Oremus is a Technology Reporter for The Washington Post. Thanks for listening to the Midweek podcast. In the next couple months, you can expect a lot of subpar coverage of Milton, and future hurricanes. That's why we at OTM made you a Breaking News Consumer's Handbook: Storm Edition, which you can find on our TikTok and Instagram pages, and on our website onthemedia.org. Just search On The Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

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