In the television debate with Kamala Harris on ABC, Donald Trump claimed that in Springfield, Ohio, illegal immigrants from Haiti were eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs. It was a lie that his Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance also repeatedly uttered. At the end of last week, the ex-president found a new target: the city of Aurora in Colorado, from which a video made the rounds showing armed men marching through an apartment building inhabited by immigrants from Venezuela.
In his campaign speech, Trump spoke of apartment buildings in Aurora being overrun by “barbaric villains” and that the city’s streets were no longer safe – a statement that even the city’s Republican mayor expressly contradicted.
Republican President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris blamed the misery in Aurora: “No person who, like Kamala Harris, is responsible for the violence and terror in this community should ever become President of the United States.” Later, in Reno, Nevada, Donald Trump claimed that the USA was “an occupied country: “I promise you: November 5th will be the day of liberation in America. Liberation Day.”
Armed gangs in Aurora, Haitians eating dogs and cats in Springfield – you might think of such nonsense as relatively harmless. But it becomes more irresponsible when conspiracy theories, often with anti-Semitic undertones in America, begin to circulate in times of need and unsettle the population, as was recently the case with Hurricane Helene or Hurricane Milton, which recently hit the south of America, over 200 Killed people and caused serious devastation.
No wonder Donald Trump tried to use fake news to exploit the natural disasters for his election campaign a good three weeks before the presidential election. Early last week in Georgia, he claimed that Gov. Brian Kemp had been unable to reach President Joe Biden to discuss emergency aid for his state. In reality, Kemp had previously been in contact with the White House.
Trump also spread lies that his close political ally Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of the short message service X, had spread on his platform. Musk said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was blocking relief flights to the disaster area, which he branded as “militant government incompetence.” The entrepreneur also said, also without evidence, that FEMA was not only failing to adequately help those affected, but was even actively preventing people from providing assistance.
Other Trump supporters claimed the federal agency was diverting aid funds to financially help illegal immigrants or was running out of money. It was also suggested that Democratic politicians were deliberately withholding emergency aid from Republicans. “There are many dangerous, misleading rumors being spread regarding the response to Hurricane Helene, and these rumors can actively prevent people from receiving assistance,” said FEMA spokeswoman Jaclyn Rothenberg. “Our priority is to ensure that disaster relief reaches people in need.”
Unsurprisingly, it was Marjorie Taylor Greene, the behaviorally problematic Republican representative from Georgia, who made the most absurd claim of all. “Yes they can control the weather,” she wrote in a tweet to her 1.2 million followers the week before last: “It’s ridiculous to lie and say that’s not possible.”
According to a map she showed, Hurricane Helena in North Carolina only hit places that voted for Donald Trump in 2020, but spared cities that voted Democratic. In her evidence, Greene also referenced a 2013 CBS television program that reported attempts to use lasers to cause rain and lightning. Keyword lasers: Greene has already claimed that lasers in space that belong to the Rothschild family triggered the bushfires in California.
Additional videos and social media posts unsubstantiatedly accused disaster relief workers of treason or theft of relief supplies. According to the think tank Institute of Strategic Dialogue, such misleading posts on X have been clicked on up to 160 million times. In addition to disaster relief workers, meteorologists, scientists and media professionals were also threatened online. In the case of meteorologists, even death threats from climate change deniers were common. “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes,” one weatherwoman wrote on X: “I can’t believe I just typed that.”
“The increasing frequency and destructive power of major storms, heatwaves, bushfires and other weather-related disasters tend to trigger a particularly emotional response, allowing climate deniers, oil and gas industry lobbyists and rumor spreaders to raise concerns and… “To exploit people’s confusion,” the New York Times analyzed the phenomenon of conspiracy theories, the spread of which is now made easier by artificial intelligence (AI). For example, heartbreaking images of fleeing children or fake videos of destructive storms were spread on social media.
«Listen. “I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” wrote a Georgia Republican Party representative (RNC) about the AI-generated image of a little girl fleeing the hurricane with a puppy in her arms: “I’m not deleting it because it’s symptomatic of the trauma and pain of people who are going through this now.” Journalist Parker Molloy captured screenshots of users admitting that the image in question was fake, but at the same time insisting that it was true on a deeper level – for Molloy, an indication “that we live in a post-reality .»
“Even in a decade marked by online scammers, shameless politicians and a right-wing alternative media complex that spreads anti-science fringe theories, the events of the last few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms devastated American cities, a patchwork of influencers and fake news purveyors have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment and hamper relief efforts,” analysts tech expert Charlie in The Atlantic magazine wart.
Warzel’s conclusion: “But this is more than just a fake news crisis. Anyone who watches as real information is overshadowed by crazy theories and officials face death threats is confronted with two alarming facts: first, that a persistent ecosystem exists that traps citizens in an alternative reality, and second, that people Those who consume and spread these lies are not helpless fools, but willing participants.”
In view of the hurricanes in North Carolina, Georgia and Florida, it was observed that people increasingly turned to traditional media such as local radio or television stations to obtain reliable information. But that’s little consolation when you consider that for many people, social media like X, YouTube or Instagram have already become the main sources of information in normal times.
The whole thing is coupled with the development that a social medium like . On X it is also possible to buy a blue tick, which was previously reserved for users who had been verified and whose identity was known.
But now the algorithm guarantees X-users who have ticked a box greater distribution, regardless of the truthfulness of their posts, and allows them to participate financially in the revenue from advertisements that are placed in the reply columns. The more nakedly someone lies, the more money they can earn. The proportion of those in the American population who are increasingly distancing themselves from reality is growing seemingly incessantly, but this does not bode well for the nation, and not just in view of the presidential election on November 5th.
