Toxic lies are surging in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton

Hurricanes Milton and Helene have absolutely devastated large swaths of the United States. But residents who are cleaning out waterlogged homes and businesses have another challenge to their recovery, one that hasn’t let up — viral disinformation.

There’s the rumor that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is limiting payouts to disaster survivors to $750. False, according to a fact-checking page the agency has set up.

What about the one that says FEMA is blocking private planes from landing in affected areas to deliver supplies? Also false.

These rumors have turned political, with some Republican politicians, including former President Donald Trump, repeating them to large audiences. As FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell said recently, the swirl of misinformation is “absolutely the worst that I have ever seen.”

“Misinformation is not uncommon in disasters. They come on fast. People see things that don’t end up being true,” Juliette Kayyem, a crisis management expert at Harvard who served as the assistant secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, told Today, Explained’s Sean Rameswaram. “I think in many ways what we’re experiencing now is purposeful lying.” Kayyem is also the author of the book The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

For people who may have missed this disaster of facts, can you just tell them what’s going on?

If you look on social media, at the atmosphere of response, there’s a lot of false facts about how the Biden administration is responding, about basic disaster response capabilities and rules. They are then amplified by, in particular, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and create their own reality that then has to be shot down by already-overburdened first responders, emergency managers, and FEMA, which has put up a rumor page on their website just to combat this crap.

One example is Donald Trump consistently saying that the money that should go to Americans who are impacted by the disaster was all used for housing illegal immigrants. Not true. There was a separate line item to support migrants and sheltering that Congress passed. That money was sent to FEMA to administer, but it wasn’t replacing disaster management funds. It didn’t even overlap. It’s just the same entity distributing these funds.

This creates a false division between the immigrants, who are not getting this money, and Americans, who might be mad that the money that they want for disaster relief is not available. They demoralize emergency managers and volunteers. They put them at risk. I have talked to people at FEMA about what’s happening on the ground. They are deploying people in larger numbers because they’re worried about what the reaction will be. Most importantly, it’s confusing victims about what they should do, what they have access to, and what’s available to them.

You’re saying that Donald Trump is perpetrating some of this misinformation. Where is he doing it?

At his rallies; on social media. Recently at a rally, he suggested that resources weren’t going to red states, that more Republicans were dying. There’s just no factual basis for it.

What’s interesting is you’re seeing Republican governors push back on that narrative, saying that they are getting the resources they want. They know that they have to work with the federal government to protect their citizens and begin these recoveries.

One of the most obnoxious, disgusting rumors being amplified out in the communications space involves whether FEMA would take your home. FEMA has a process where they can buy your home. It’s a very small program. It’s if you, the homeowner, and FEMA agree on a fair market value and you don’t want to live there anymore because it’s been flooded four years in a row, and this is a rational transactional decision.

This narrative that they’re going to take your home — what does that do? Well, it makes people very nervous about leaving their home. And so you hear people now saying, “I’m not going to leave, because if I leave my home, the government’s going to take it.” Those are the real-world impacts of all of these lies.

And you’re saying this is being amplified not only by other Republican politicians, but by the owner of Twitter?

Yes. He is probably the biggest amplifier of disinformation, retweeting things that are clearly false.

What they’re trying to do is create divisions in communities in two ways. One is the divide between the citizen and government, which has always been a tactic by that wing of MAGA-ism. Then also [there’s the divide] between citizens and their neighbors. That creates chaos, confusion, and divisions.

I think why you’re seeing such a concerted pushback by GOP governors, but also by FEMA and others who are calling this out, is because they know it can harm their response capabilities. I should say this is being done at a time when we’re seeing our very communication networks under stress. Communications are down. It’s hard to communicate with people. And so they have that vacuum being filled by this noxiousness of which has life-and-death consequences.

Back during Hurricane Sandy, I distinctly remember social media being useful for people. It was useful for people going through Sandy, it was useful for government agencies to get out information. Is that era of social media being a helpful tool in a disaster over?

It’s over. Elon Musk broke “Disaster Twitter.”

Twitter’s moment of birth, the moment that its founder realized its benefit, was during a minor earthquake in San Francisco. It had been just one of those other social media platforms. But it was that real-time, authenticated information that was flowing in people’s feeds that the leadership at Twitter began to take its responsibility in a disaster very seriously.

You had an entire system, including the government relying on Twitter to amplify good information, and that whole system is down. This is the first domestic disaster where that is entirely clear, that Twitter is broken across the board for disaster management.

Is the mis- and disinformation around Milton as bad as that we saw after Helene?

You saw it more online than, say, from political leadership.

You saw much more aggressive government [and] FEMA pushback on that. They were sort of ready now. Helene was — I think they were sort of caught [by surprise]. So you saw just a lot of outreach, a lot of push back on the misinformation and even from [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis, who pushed back on some of that.

Do you think this makes an agency like FEMA more prepared for the next hurricane and for the next storm, if you will, of misinformation?

Yeah, I think it will, on the misinformation and the lies front. I think it’s just going to be part of your emergency management plan. You’re going to push back on the rumors in a very formal way. It used to be done, but it was very piecemeal. I saw language coming out of FEMA spokespeople, which I’d never seen before, essentially just calling out the lies, in particular on social media. So they’re using the language, the sort of freewheeling language, of social media, which I think is important, rather than the sort of more formal language of government.

I think from the hype around Milton, there was this sense that, like, it could destroy Tampa. And it’s early yet, but I don’t think that happened. Do you think that sort of confirms and fuels this misinformation engine after an event like this?

Yeah, it will be viewed as overreach, as “the government’s incompetent, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.” I think the next evacuation will be harder if you don’t see the kind of damage and the kind of death that everyone was worried about. This is something that’s common, it has a name: the preparedness paradox.

If you are ready, you get houses ready, you get communities ready, you get them to evacuate, and the thing comes through and the damage is less than you were worried about — that’s why you wanted the evacuation. That’s why you wanted the houses to be ready.

People will say, “What were you so worried about in the first place?“ In other words, the government’s reaction, which may have minimized harm and damage and death, may very well, paradoxically, be viewed as the government’s original assessment was wrong.

Could FEMA be doing a better job during Helene and now Milton?

It’s hard for me to know right now. In some ways, FEMA’s biggest challenge is going to be recovery. How quickly can they deploy resources?

In Helene, the biggest lesson learned is how we communicate risk to Americans who may not view themselves at risk. Looking back, the only warnings that were given were a flood warning given to communities where there could be a flood. That is likely because people remember the soil was very saturated from rains in the days before. And I wonder if, in hindsight, flood warning — does it get people to move? Maybe we should think about how we communicate risk, especially because we’re getting these events that don’t really have historical precedent.