Politically-charged rumors and conspiracy theories about Helene flourish on X

Avery Dull left her apartment in Hendersonville, North Carolina with her baby daughter a day after she made a TikTok showing brown floodwater from Hurricane Helene swelling beneath her second-floor balcony. Staying with friends two hours away and her life in limbo, Dull has been spending a lot of time online.

“Usually I’m in bed by 10 p.m. I haven’t gone to bed till 3 a.m. since this happened,” she told NPR. “I mean, I’ve been up all day and night just trying to find any, any information I can whatsoever. It has been consuming me.”

Having evacuated, Dull is turning to videos on TikTok to keep her up to date on her community.

“This is my hometown. And to see these places just water up to the roof, I can’t even comprehend it…I walked those streets and they’re just, I mean, sunk.”

She constantly watches for death toll updates. “I want to know if any of my family members who I haven’t heard from are alive and well…And every time I update, it goes up, like, five people.”

People like Dull, as well as those still in their storm-damaged communities, are hungry for reliable information. When they turn to social media, they’re finding mixed results. Some platforms don’t have much news at all. Other platforms have enabled them to form groups that provide information and companionship.

And then there is X, formerly known as Twitter, where politically charged rumors flow freely. Emergency management researchers lament that the platform owned by Elon Musk, which was once considered a useful source of information in a disaster, is instead contributing to the chaos in Helene’s wake.

The disaster became fodder for political attacks

The storm hit two swing states just a month before a close election, making criticisms about the response a tempting political line of attack.

On X, the top results for “Helene” have millions of views but are not always reliable.

“‘$2.4 billion aid to Ukraine’ vs ‘No more aid for Hurricane Helene’ – 3 days apart” pro-Trump account End Wokeness wrote alongside video clips of President Joe Biden speaking on two occasions. The post received over 5 million views.

The text misrepresents one of the Biden videos. In it, Biden responds “no” when asked if more federal resources will be directed to disaster relief and says that local governments have yet to ask for what has already been allocated. The video also shows Biden saying the federal government had already pre-planned hurricane relief even before states had asked for disaster aid.

Former president Donald Trump claimed without evidence that Democrats were withholding aid from Republican areas. Trump also falsely claimed that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp had not been able to speak to Biden, even though both confirmed they had spoken to one another.

There’s no evidence the federal government is withholding aid from affected states. The Republican governors of South Carolina and Georgia have praised the federal government’s support.

Other videos on X made wilder claims.

“Don’t worry guys, weather modification isn’t real! It’s just a coincidence that Hurricane Helene is one of the most devastating ‘inland damage storms’ in history and that hundreds of pro-Trump counties are being massively impacted during the most important election of our lifetimes,” influencer Matt Wallace posted alongside video footage of flooding. The post received 11 million views.

False claims about weather-altering tools have become common in the aftermath of major storms, said Amber Silver, who teaches emergency management at the University of Albany. “And there’s always questions about…is this storm, you know, man-made or is it natural?”

“But the scale of that amount of chatter with Helene was unexpected for this event,” she said.

Twitter was useful for disaster response, X less so

While X’s predecessor, Twitter, has always had fewer users than other major social media platforms, “it has been historically very influential in disaster preparedness [and] response,” Silver said.

In a recent study, Silver and her colleagues surveyed people about how they used social media after Hurricane Dorian in 2019.

“When people were sharing pictures of themselves at the grocery stores with carts full of supplies, or standing in line to get gas, or standing in line at Home Depot buying a generator, people felt internal pressure to prepare for the storm, too,” she said.

After a disaster struck, people used the platform to spread information that helped first responders plan and call for help, Silver said.

But since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022 and its subsequent transformation into X, all that has shifted. A blue check mark used to mean that the company had verified a user’s identity. Now it just means the user has paid for a subscription, which makes identifying which accounts are trustworthy more difficult. The company also raised the cost of access to analyze its data, making rumor-monitoring efforts prohibitively expensive for many researchers.

“The kind of difference here that we’re experiencing is just the amount of kind of maybe unuseful tweets that you have to dig through to be able to find the useful, actionable ones,” said Samantha Montano, an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. “And that’s a real challenge because in a disaster, you don’t necessarily have time to be digging through all of that.”

Researchers have not yet looked at whether the effects of X’s changes under Musk are negative for disaster response. Silver is applying for funding to answer the question.

“I do still think that there are real benefits to using social media in disasters — whether it’s Twitter, Tik Tok or something else — as a way for people to organize among themselves and work directly with survivors,” Montano said.

Dull says she has been relying on TikTok and a neighborhood Facebook group as well as family and friends in the area. She wants to know both what’s happening now and what’s happening next.

“I would like to hear updates on the people that are trapped on top of mountains right now. I would like to know what steps they’re going to take to move forward and start rebuilding,” said Dull. “I want to know how they’re going to help us feel a sense of normalcy again.”

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