Lawfare Daily: Lies and Rumors After Hurricanes Helene and Milton

[Intro]

Kate Starbird: I think we have these sort of supercharged, you know, just like the heat of the Gulf of Mexico has supercharged the storms, the dynamics of our information platforms are supercharging the rumoring and conspiracy theorizing that are, that's happening around these events.

Quinta Jurecic: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Quinta Jurecic, Senior Editor at Lawfare with Kate Starbird, the co-founder of the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, and a professor at the University's Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering.

Kate Starbird: We do see these savvier partisan media outlets sort of point at these things for their audiences. They bring them up, they just surface, oh look, you know, this, political leaders said this, or this person is claiming that FEMA isn't there for them. And they know that people are going to interpret them as part of this larger story that has a partisan bend.

Quinta Jurecic: Today we're talking about the flood of rumors and conspiracy theories following Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.

[Main Podcast]

I asked you on to talk about what seems like a pretty astonishing surge of lies and falsehoods that have been inundating the media ecosystem following Hurricane Helene. And I should also say we're recording this on the morning of Wednesday, October 9^th, so by the time that listeners hear this, there may well be even more to deal with following Hurricane Milton's impending landfall in Florida. Just to start off though, Kate, how would you describe the information environment right now in the midst of these hurricanes?

Kate Starbird: I think it's hard for anyone to fully, you know, characterize everything that's going on, I think, as a researcher, you know, five years ago, I would have been on Twitter, and I would have been collecting data on Twitter and other places, and had a good, and been able to make a claim of like, okay, this is what's happening, or whatever.

Right now, I think we're in a situation where there's not as much transparency of these platforms. I'm not even on that platform anymore for various reasons. And I don't know if I can just simply say, like, here's how I would characterize the information space. I know that there's a lot, there are a lot of rumors spreading, there are intentional disinformation efforts, I would expect. I don't, I can't put my finger on them because I don't have the visibility that we used to have. We know that there's conspiracy theories spreading widely. We do know that influencers, political leaders have picked up and repeated conspiracy theories, for instance about FEMA and others, which is particularly troubling.

But I think one of the hard parts is the information system is so fragmented. And transparency is so much lower than it was a few years ago that it's hard to simply characterize what's happening in a way that, with hard data and strong statements, it's more of like we're in a vibe situation. Like, it really feels like something bad is going on, that things are markedly worse than they've been in the past, but it's hard to like quantify that. We just don't have the data anymore.

Quinta Jurecic: Yeah, the vibes are definitely bad, I will say. I mean, there's been a ton of reporting about, you know, lies, falsehoods, rumors circulating in the wake of these hurricanes.

I saw a publication on the website of Representative Chuck Edwards, who represents a district in Western North Carolina that starts with, so it says, I'm here to dispel the outrageous rumors that have been circulating online. Number one, Hurricane Helene was not geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock. Chimney Rock being a town in Western North Carolina that was pretty much wiped out by the storm.

So that's the first line. And it pretty much goes downhill from there. I mean, there has been all kinds of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about FEMA staff, about the mayor of Asheville, which was a very hard hit by Hurricane Helene. Conspiracy theories about the sort of alleged bulldozing of Chimney Rock, which is not true. About unidentified sources controlling the weather. I mean, it's definitely, there is a lot going around.

Kate Starbird: Yeah. I mean, so I've been studying social media use during crisis events since 2010, so a long time, and I did my dissertation in a lab that really understood just the dynamics of crisis events.

And I do want to say that like, rumoring, conspiracy theorizing, all of that, during a crisis event, it's really, really common. This is not a new thing. It's actually sort of a natural part of the coping with a disaster event, that people come together, they try to figure out what's going on. They share what they know they theorize about what things that they don't know about. They speculate, especially in the absence of official information and now with the distrust of official information, you see these gaps, where people try to bridge those gaps, to reduce uncertainty, reduce anxiety by rumoring, and rumors serve like psychological, social, and informational purposes. And so I don't think that we can say like, okay, to tell rumors is necessarily bad. To tell rumors about these crisis events is natural.

I think what's happened, and as a researcher of this, we can kind of see that just how much more prominent that sort of rumoring has become over time during these events, especially online, as well as the intentional politicization of the crisis events, which combined with those rumors, and just sort of like the dynamics of these online platforms where, what we would have seen as authoritative information providers, have been sidelined and sort of replaced by influencers who have gained that influence by gaming the dynamics of these crisis events and other kinds of breaking news events by spreading outrageous bullshit. And the folks that did that best are now the sort of, Renée DiResta would call them, the invisible rulers of our information environment, right? These are the folks that shape the information flows. And so because of those dynamics, I think we have these sort of supercharged, you know, just like the heat of the Gulf of Mexico has supercharged the storms. The dynamics of our information platforms are supercharging the rumoring and conspiracy-theorizing that are, that's happening around these events.

Quinta Jurecic: And so, is that supercharging a gradual process or are there particular sort of hinge points that you would identify as moments when this got really bad? I mean, the obvious one that I want to ask you about, of course, is Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter and his reworking of the mechanics of that site to, kind of reward, as you say, influencers who are putting forward outrageous claims and sort of downranking or pushing to the side authoritative government sources.

Kate Starbird: Yeah, I mean, I think we can mark that moment as a shift in the dynamics of that platform that likely made it markedly worse in, under these conditions, but we can go back a lot further and kind of as a person who was studying it as it happened, I started out by studying digital volunteerism or sort of pro-social behavior during crisis events. And over time, I began to drift into studying misinformation and disinformation, and that's because those phenomena were becoming more and more common during crisis events in the online environments and more, and just a more salient part of that discourse.

If you want to go back to other hinge points, we can go back to Hurricane Sandy, and we can look at Comfortably Smug. This guy was intentionally putting BS into the space to gain attention. It really worked for him. He did get called out, but it didn't stop him. He's still an influencer online. It probably didn't hurt him. It probably helped him in the long term in terms of gaining that kind of attention. And he's just intentionally spreading stuff, kind of showing the power of that kind of behavior for garnering attention.

Along the way, there have been tons of other events. I do think there was a period in, you know, around the pandemic, 2020, where platforms started to try to think about moderating rumors and misinformation, and there was this sort of hope that things were going to get a little bit better. Unfortunately, the backlash against that moderation by those who benefited from manipulating the dynamics in the ways that they have has perhaps made the platforms worse than they were prior.

And it's made it really hard to deal with this issue of people being able to get accurate information about, about a storm that's having horrific impacts. And intersecting with, with, what we're seeing right now, is intersecting with an election in really complicated ways, where it's really important for people to get accurate information so they don't get disenfranchised and otherwise. And instead we get these just wild conspiracy theories that are not helping, and really actually harming the response.

We've seen these conspiracies about FEMA for forever. Before I was studying conspiracy theories, like the FEMA mobile residences, I forget what they call them, but there's always been, you know, issues and conspiracy theories about FEMA. But to see it just become so vitriolic and to see, you know, people really accusing these folks of trying to harm the response, and of violence and other kinds of things it's really troubling and I think it doesn't bode well. It's going to make it harder for the response. It's going to hurt the response and it's going to ultimately hurt the people that are so impacted by this horrific event.

Quinta Jurecic: Yeah, I mean, to the question of how this is affecting the disaster response, I've seen a lot of statements from people at FEMA. I believe the FEMA administrator made some comment about, you know, this is the worst I've ever seen it. It's making it harder for us to carry out this work.

But also from, you know, people who are operating on a local level in disaster response saying, you know, I'm having to take time that I would like to be able to use for, you know, getting people food, getting people water to go around explaining to people, you know, FEMA is not going to come and shoot you, that kind of thing. Like, it makes the job harder.

One thing that I have I've really been struck by and that I wanted to ask you whether it's new or whether I just, you know, didn't notice it before was, as you say, the degree of like threats of violence against people carrying out disaster response. Obviously, as you say, FEMA has always kind of been a target for folks who distrust the government for theorizing, but the, you know, I was reading an article about the people within FEMA working on this, saying that, you know, they'd been all, they'd been getting calls with death threats, that kind of thing. And that feels to me like a newer political innovation, but is it, am I overstating things there?

Kate Starbird: I think it's probably a question of scale. I do think that those, that rhetoric has been there in a very small group of people that are just sort of rabidly anti-government. There have been those kinds of conspiracy theories around FEMA for a long time.

What I think that's changed is the number of people that are hearing them. They're sinking in, they're sharing them online, but they're also taking them offline. And we know that kind of 1-2 punch can be really powerful where they begin to bring them into other conversations, these theories they've heard online. And I think that the scale of that means that there's more people. And the problem with that is that if, for every, you know, person who believes this, there's a one-in-thousand chance that they're gonna go do something when it's a tiny group of people, it doesn't matter that much, but when it's a large group of people, it becomes a lot more of a risk for these emergency responders. And so, I do, I think in that case it's not a completely new thing, but it's one of scale.

And the new thing for me is to see people with a lot of influence, even in some cases political leaders, not the local political leaders. The folks in those states and things have come out and have countered these statements and corrected them and told them they’re wrong. But when we see others try to use this for political gain, other people that have a lot of visibility that are followed and admired by a lot of people in our country and around the world, that's where this danger, that's new and that is particularly frightening. Elected political leaders in the United States repeating some of these things is something I have not seen, in my time studying this until recently.

Quinta Jurecic: There's also a strange dynamic that I've seen where political actors who have in the past sort of promoted theories that are not particularly based in fact, and sort of helps to, I would argue, maybe undermine trust in government are now saying, you know, no, you really need to listen to us, you know, listen to NOAA, listen to FEMA, you need to evacuate.

And there's a little bit of a, I think it can be frustrating to see that. But it also speaks to something that is really striking, which is, you know, if you degrade trust in government in one corner of, you know, you can't trust election administration, something like that. Then when the government comes out and says, hey, you know, there's a Category Five hurricane, you really need to evacuate, it's very hard to then walk that back and say, okay, but you listen to them here. Right?

To what extent is this, you'd mentioned distrust in government as a key factor here. To what extent is this situation worse because we have been seeing this sort of long running project of delegitimizing other government functions? I'm chiefly thinking of election administration, but of course there are others.

Kate Starbird: Yeah, of course there's a lot of parallels to what we've seen in election administration and in disaster response right now. You know, I don't think it's, this is not all new either. There's a, one of these horrific cases where there was this shooting at an Oregon community college in 2015, I think. And the local sheriff there was trying to bat down conspiracy theories that it hadn't happened. And it turned out that sheriff had participated in conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook. And so, it's, this is not unprecedented.

I do think that it's important in the moment for us to understand that the response, the response is more important than our need to call out the hypocrisy. I think there's a time afterwards where there should be like, you know, let's go revisit how you contributed to this and how now you're saying, oh gosh, look, it's the leopards are eating the faces or whatever it is. Right? Like there is a time. I'm not sure right now is the time. I think we're still responding, and I think, and also I think it's important for us to leave pathways for people to come back from those kinds of things for them to have that recognition by trying to smear their face in it, or like really trying to embarrass that, then people are just going to anchor in.

And so I think it's, these are important, I think these, there are lessons to be learned. And I think in order for folks to learn this, these lessons, I think we aren't going to have to give them a little bit of space. And the space right now should be the moment of like, let's really focus on the response and let's talk about how we might've contributed to the situation perhaps, perhaps in a couple of weeks after, you know, after things have-. And really take, take the allies in this that we can. I think it's important for communities that have listened to those folks to hear them with a different message right now. And again, if we silence them by pointing out the hypocrisy, I don't think that helps anything.

Quinta Jurecic: That's interesting. So, you know, if someone has a connection with a community, because they've been, you know, passing ideas back and forth that are sort of on the fringe that you think they might actually be able, more able to speak to them and say, hey, you need to take this seriously.

Kate Starbird: I do. I do think that can be a very persuasive, persuasive voice. And hopefully they build on that and, you know, going forward and think about other ways that they can, they maybe made mistakes in the past and can help. But in that moment, if those are the folks that people trust, it's not bad to have them saying, you know, repeating this message that these conspiracy theories are false and harmful. And that, I think we should be careful about, about overplaying the hypocrisy card at this moment.

Quinta Jurecic: So we've talked about the role of social media platforms. I do want to touch on the role of legacy media as well. But before we move on to that, just one question for listeners who may be less familiar with sort of how the landscape of these things has changed in recent years. You'd mentioned that, you know, it's really hard to know what is going on just because you don't have access to the same kind of resources now that you would have had even a few years ago. So, why is that? And you know, what's changed? What does that look like for you?

Kate Starbird: I can speak for our research team and then I'll speak a little bit more broadly. So since 2010, 2009, actually, I've been involved in research that looked at social media use during crisis events that relied very heavily on Twitter data. Because there was a free pipeline that you could tap into, as anyone with the right code. Someone gave me my first starter code in 2010, and I've been doing it ever since. I could collect just millions of tweets a day, about a crisis event, and we had this whole infrastructure built to do that.

And you know, Twitter wasn't a perfect signal for everything that was going on, but it really was sort of, like, as a researcher, we felt like we had a thumb on the pulse of the internet. Twitter wasn't everything, but it really was for breaking news, that was the place that people went, and especially journalists. And so it really did play a role in shaping discourse around an event and for relaying real time information. I actually did a whole dissertation on digital volunteerism of how people help other people using Twitter and other platforms during crisis events.

So, we had all this data. That access to data got shut down when Twitter became X and when it was purchased. And it got repriced where the cost of what we were getting for free went to initially $42,000 a month. And it was not lost on us that was a troll, in terms of the number that was provided. But now, I mean, I don't even think that we could pay that and get anywhere near the kinds of volume we had in the past. So we really lost that kind of transparency.

We now have, you know, some other access, it's far more limited and we're figuring out what to do with that. And so we do some discovery of rumors there. And in our most recent blog posts, we track the spread across influencers of a couple of rumors, but we're much more limited in what we can collect and study there.

Similarly, Facebook for a few years had public data that was shared. They're not private data, but public data, they're shared by public channels and public groups was available through the CrowdTangle platform, and they've shut that down. Reddit data was available and was collected at scale for research, and they've shut that down. And so these big platforms where we had a lot of visibility, we just don't have visibility anymore. And they shut them down, perhaps for different reasons, perhaps for similar reasons. There's a lot of things that are happening there, but certainly we have less visibility.

At the same time, people have, like, migrated away from Twitter onto other platforms. The rise of short form video means that a lot of people are on TikTok or Instagram or other places. And so we're really getting a much more fragmented information space where people are in a lot of different places at once, and it's really hard to understand what's happening everywhere.

And most breaking news events, rumors around those breaking news events, most of these phenomena are not just things that are happening in one place. They're cross-platform phenomena. In fact, influencers use platforms in complementary ways. And we see certain, like even disinformation campaigns will use one platform for one thing and another platform for another. And so, it's just a much more complicated information environment. And it's harder to see what's going on, because our portals of what we can see as researchers and journalists are much smaller.

Quinta Jurecic: So I want to make sure that we don't totally let legacy media off the hook here, because I will say one of the big rumors that I have seen circulating, I believe originates with Fox News. So there's a Fox clip that the network aired multiple times that sort of cuts off a statement made by Vice President Kamala Harris, who was, I believe, in North Carolina announcing that people could get $750 in immediate assistance, for disaster response. She then goes on to list other services and resources that the government is providing, but the clip is edited so that it looks like she's saying you could only get $750 and that's all the government's going to do for you.

And that seems to have picked up steam. It's on the page of debunking that Representative Chuck Edwards has put up, for example. And I guess I don't know whether it got started with Fox, but Fox certainly gave it a lot of oxygen. And that, I don't know, is that something that we can blame on a social media platform? So how do you understand that aspect of things here?

Kate Starbird: Yeah, I mean, our media ecosystems or ecosystems, there are a bunch of different things that are connected in ways that are in increasingly complicated and I'm not sure I would call Fox News legacy media at this point. I think there's a certain kind of-

Quinta Jurecic: Fair enough.

Kate Starbird: A partisan media outlet. We've got some on the right. We've got a few on the left as well. Depending on where you sit on the spectrum, you may see more on one side than the other. But we know we have partisan media that are not just out there to tell stories, but that they're out there to tell stories with certain kinds of slants, and their audiences expect it.

And we see interplay between the things that are happening on social media and the things happening in these sort of partisan media outlets, whether that's television clips or on through their websites. And sometimes things start in one place and go to the other and they can actually go in both directions. Sometimes things start on Fox or MSNBC and end up on social media. And sometimes they come from social media and eventually get amplified by these outlets. And certainly when they move over from social media to these television media they burst into a new audience. And so it's really quite problematic to see those kinds of rumors get, get amplification to audiences, the size of what Fox News has.

And so, it's very troubling, but I see it all as sort of a connected system. And I don't say, oh, it's social media versus mainstream media versus partisan cable news or whatever. It's an integrated system where things are moving across them and in complementary ways. Sometimes you see really, really sort of extreme versions of the rumor online and then it'll get a little bit whitewashed as it moves into these more mainstream, but wider audience television audience kind of spaces where they're a little bit more careful not to completely spell out the conspiracy theory, but they're hand waving at it, and that, it's reinforcing the messages.

They know that their audiences are seeing those other messages as well. And we know that the repetition of these messages is very effective. And so we do see these savvier partisan media outlets sort of point at these things for their audiences. They bring them up. They just surface, oh, look, you know, this political leader said this, or this person is claiming that FEMA isn't there for them, and they know that people are going to interpret them as part of this larger story that has a partisan bent. And often speaks to some of these very problematic and false conspiracy theories.

And so, we really have to, you know, to understand what's going on, we have to start understanding this as a, as an interconnected system. And we have to recognize that these partisan media outlets, they know what they're doing. We can see they'll put that media, they'll put that article and it's just that clip and they don't quite even say what they mean. And you just go watch all the comments of that on social media, because their audiences know exactly what they're implying.

Quinta Jurecic: It makes me think of something that I know you've talked about in the context of the Big Lie in the 2020 election, of participatory disinformation, I think is the term that you use, that there's an engagement that goes, you know, it goes both ways, so to speak.Is that sort of what you're describing here?

Kate Starbird: I mean, absolutely. That's part of it. Where audiences and influencers and elites in politics and media sort of collaborate to create rumors, to create false narratives, and to create narratives that we might even not be able to say are true or false.

They're collaborating to create a common understanding of what's going on. And we've got sort of elites in media and things will set the larger frames, but then your audiences will help create content. And then the influencers, these online influencers work to sort of like selectively assemble the different evidence into these conspiracy theories. And so, it really isn't, it's those sort of dynamics are becoming really baked in to our media ecosystem. And social media influencers play one role, elites in media and politics. And by elites, I mean, like, you know, elected officials and media platforms that have broad followings that are on television, political pundits, those kinds of folks.

And then everyday audiences who get, you know, get, they can become part of it by sharing a new piece of evidence that aligns with these conspiracy theories. And so you see them sort of competing for attention from their influencers by participating in this way. And so, and it's not, I mean, rumoring has always had this sort of participatory process, but certainly the online dynamics where they're trying to bend these rumors into particular political frames, that's the piece that really is striking in this event. It's been evolving for a long time, but it really has come to a head. I think a lot of people can see it pretty clearly right at this moment.

Quinta Jurecic: So I want to make sure that we talk about how all of this connects to, of course, the election. There have been a lot of conspiracy theories that I've seen about, you know, the Democrats engineered the hurricane to wipe out, you know, red areas of Western North Carolina and Florida to help them in the election, you know, that kind of thing.

There's also just, you know, people who are anxious about how they're going to vote. If their ballot, you know, their home is destroyed, what are they going to do? What about their polling place? So how have you been seeing that play into this?

Kate Starbird: That's really what our team is focused on in this event because we're doing a lot of sort of rapid work around rumors and about the 2024 election and also anticipating what we might expect coming, going into election day and afterwards. The conspiracy theories I think we've already mentioned and perhaps we're paying a little bit too much attention to them.

I'm almost more worried about some of the rumors that we're going to see, that we're already seeing that we're going to see just around people trying to figure out when and where and how to vote. So what we have is a situation where voting and the election infrastructure has been disrupted for people, for many people, large numbers of people in two potential swing states, especially North Carolina, where people won't be able, like the polling places may not be usable that they were planning to use, where people have been displaced who are maybe expecting to receive a mail-in ballot. Or people that need to vote with a photo ID may not have access to their photo ID anymore because their possessions are no longer accessible to them.

So we've got a lot of hard sort of disruptions to the election process. And we know that those kinds of disruptions, they create confusion, confusion breeds sort of organic rumors, but confusion also becomes a potential target for disinformation. People really are vulnerable in these places to being misled in ways that could a, disenfranchise them, but then down the line can also sow distrust in, in election results.

And so we're seeing sort of a first wave of rumors, really well intentioned, of people just trying to figure out what's going on, trying to get information and election officials are trying to adapt their plans. But they have plans, and so they're trying to adapt what's going to happen based on the plans that they've already made, communicate that to voters, and how they're going to be able to do things, and they're going to have to make some adaptations.

We're going to see, we anticipate also seeing a second wave of rumors, and it really depends on how different states go. A second wave of rumors that may try to sow distrust in the process because of the changes that were made. Because of the changes that they have to make, if they don't like the results, they might say, oh, look, they changed the voter ID requirements in North Carolina based on plans they've already had if a natural disaster, as they call it, has happened within 100 days. They have, you know, certain stipulations for someone who's lost their ID. We may see that get tied in to these non-citizen voting rumors where they claim that these voter IDs aren't required and that people are going to exploit that to let people vote that are ineligible. And so, or to have, you know, some kind of voter fraud.

So I do expect a second wave of rumors right now. I think we're still in the first one. I think it's just really going to be important for election officials to make sure they're communicating with their constituents, like where they're going to be able to vote, how they're going to be able to vote, and for journalists and influencers as well. Influencers are playing a role with this and for them to help communicate the right information.

And unfortunately, I mean, fortunately and unfortunately, depending on who you talk to, but one of the complicating factors in the United States is elections are held at a local level. The rules are different in every single place. Not every single place, but the rules vary across state and even across counties. And so for each, you know, for each location, information might be a little bit different. And so what's true for one group may not be true for another. And that's just, again, a lot of complexity, a lot of confusion that can be exploited and can accidentally generate rumors as well.

Quinta Jurecic: It occurs to me, you know, as you're saying, election officials in these jurisdictions, you know, there are plans for what to do in a disaster scenario.

Kate Starbird: Absolutely

Quinta Jurecic: There are, you know, there are things that you can do. And it occurs to me, again this is a vibes-based analysis, but a lot of the sort of discussion that I've seen online of people who are just scared, trying to figure out what's going on, seems to assume a level of absence on the part of the government, at all levels, federal, state, local.

You know, you see people saying, well, I can't evacuate from, you know, my home in Florida because I don't have a car or I can't drive or something like that, you know, I can't pay for a hotel. And there are services that will help you to go where you need to go, but it seems like there's a real lack of awareness that, you know, these services exist or, you know, the election administrators in Asheville, you know, there are plans, there are laws, you can do things to respond to disaster situations. That there's a sense that everything is perhaps more brittle than it actually is, that maybe feeds into that sense of distrust. So again, very vibes-based, but I'm curious what you make of that.

Kate Starbird: I mean, I think for communicators to say this isn't, you know, this isn't unprecedented. Things have been disrupted. I think Hurricane Sandy did disrupt things in some voting that year. Hurricane Dorian, I think, had some impacts that disrupted people and they had to change.

There are plans in place. Election officials have been aware for many years that hurricanes hit during this time and there have been continuously plans for hurricanes around election infrastructure and I imagine that they are there for all these states. I have talked to someone who said that's true, but I'll definitely double check that. But my understanding is that it's that these all these states had plans in place and they're going to, you know, adapt their processes based on the impacts to infrastructure.

One of the things about the definition of a crisis event is that we couldn't plan for it because things happened in a way that are unexpected. There are, you know, we can say, okay, the hurricane, even if you know exactly where it's going to hit, you don't really know exactly how it's going to affect infrastructure, and we actually don't know where a hurricane is going to hit until it does, because there's always this sort of cone of uncertainty.

And so, I think there's part of this, it's like changing expectations of like, crisis events are crisis events. We can't be prepared for all crisis events all the time. That's like the definition of crisis. But we can understand in advance that certain kinds of things are problematic. And we can put plans in place and we've got to be able to trust those plans. And you know what, they're not going to be perfect, and there's going to be things that we want to be critical of, and we're going to have to fix them for next time.

But we also have to understand that, that, you know, we're doing the best that we can with the resources we have. And we're in a time where crisis events are very common in, from hurricanes to fires. And we're going to have to start adapting our understanding of how they work and how we respond and what the role of our federal government is and what the role of state governments and other kinds of things are to be resilient. And this is something we should all be talking about, again, not this week, but, you know, in a few weeks.

And one of the things about rumors to remember, I think, is even when they're false, and even some of the conspiracy theories, some of them are just, you know, people trying to score political points and get attention. But sometimes, you know, even when they're false, they reflect real confusion or real fear that people have. And I think what we're seeing a lot is people are very confused. There's a lot of fear. There's a lot of impact. There's, it’s a tragic event. And this is just people trying to cope with that. And how do we help those folks collectively cope? And it's not necessarily just calling out everybody for accidentally spreading falsehoods.

It's certainly calling out the people that are monetizing it and using it for political gain. But there's also just, like, how do we, like, understand that these rumors reflect real questions, confusions, and fears? And how do we help emergency responders get their messages out to the people who need to hear them, both for their response and in the stuff that we study around making sure they can vote?

Quinta Jurecic: Keeping in mind, as you say, that we're still very much in, in the thick of things right now. Are there, you know, particular things that you would want to see from folks communicating with the public? To, you know, get those messages across, as you say, particular strategies. I saw the White House opened a Reddit account and started posting information about how to get help from the hurricane, that kind of thing.

Kate Starbird: Yeah. I mean, my, my first recommendation is for emergency communicators in this case to really, to spend some time gauging whether the rumors they're seeing or are organic or not. And if they're organic, if they're coming from your community, to really treat it more as a dialogue. And not just like slapping misinformation on things and saying, telling people they're wrong. But really to, and I see this happening, I think they're doing a good job, really take the time to communicate, understanding that these rumors reflect real confusions, trying to get the information out as well that they can, correcting, but correcting with care, especially when these things are organic.

When these things are politicized by people outside of your area, absolutely. I think we should be condemning that. I think that's one of the issues where we have with this, like, convergence from all over the world is that these small, affected communities have become sort of, opportunities for others to exploit their pain for their gain. And so how do we get those other sort of, voices out of the conversation and really help communicate with the affected communities.

And I think, you know, social media makes that more complicated and that's going to be a challenge for the responders. But I think they're going to do a good job with that. And I see people doing the right thing, especially even sort of some of the political leaders in those areas to say, you know what, we need to get rid of the noise, and then actually let's address the real confusion underneath some of this stuff to make sure people have the information they need about the response and about what they can do to recover.

Quinta Jurecic: Let's leave it there. Kate, thank you so much for joining us.

Kate Starbird: All right. Thank you for inviting me. Always, I always love to, to chat with you.

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