In the wake of two major hurricanes to hit Florida and the southeast, emergency workers trying to get aid to survivors have to contend with a new problem: explosive misinformation on social media, including death threats from right-wing agitators.
One post on TikTok from a person with around 5,700 followers garnered 204,000 views, according to Media Matters. It's a video with text that says, "Dear Feds and Fema … if you violate your constitutional oath to protect and assist, the charge will be TREASON. Punishment can mean being unalived immediately by the citizens you are withholding aid from." FEMA has had to combat false claims that it is confiscating donations to hurricane survivors, turning away volunteers, or diverting funds to support migrants, among other misleading rumors about disaster aid that have blown up online recently. The agency set up a webpage for "hurricane rumor response" last week.
The user wasn't banned and was free to post more like this, though after other media noticed it a Tik Tok spokesperson offered this minimum viable response: "We immediately removed all content in the report and are proactively working to keep misinformation off TikTok and connect people to reliable information from FEMA."
News media is experiencing cell death, where the wall break, the organism deflates, and the matter inside spreads out into the void. A few motes and memes glitter briefly in the electron beam. Then entropy wins. And when it comes to the lies being spread, to complain about it—not least do anything about them—makes you the fascist.
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