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4 hours ago
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The Hollywood sign was not on fire. Firefighters weren’t using women’s purses to put out fires. A fish is not responsible for the blazes. The Los Angeles fire department didn’t see big budget cuts. The fires were not started deliberately as some kind of mass plot related to high-speed rail or the 2028 Olympics. Firefighting efforts did not include spraying a mood stabilizer into the air to put locals into a trance. Diversity measures are not to blame.
Fires are still burning in Los Angeles, and with them has come a near-constant stream of rumors, half-truths, conspiracy theories and outright lies. Natural disasters have long led to the spread of misinformation as people try to make sense of destruction and grasp for control when the world around them is destroyed. In the aftermath of the disaster, a lot is still unknown: what caused it, what could have prevented it, who could be to blame.
“Misinformation can kind of rush into that void and give people explanations for why this is happening, and typically those explanations fit into kind of their existing beliefs or narratives that they want to perpetuate,” said Lisa Fazio, a professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University.
After Hurricane Helene devastated North Carolina just before the election last November, misinformation similar to the claims circulating about Los Angeles emerged. Donald Trump, Elon Musk and others used the disaster to attack the Biden administration and spread unfounded claims.
Samantha Montano, a professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy who studies disaster response, said there are examples going back hundreds of years of misinformation related to disasters. But the volume of misinformation around Helene was greater than the US had seen for a single short-term event, she said.
“One of the big questions after Helene was: Is this amount of misinformation in disasters going to continue, or was that just because of the election?” she said. “And so that’s something I’ve been trying to keep an eye on with California, and I think it’s manifested sometimes a little bit differently, but it has probably kept up pace.”
This type of misinformation can have extreme consequences – people rely on accurate information during an emergency to make informed decisions for themselves and their families. When the information environment is muddied, people can’t make effective decisions, Montano said.
“When this happens during an actual response, like when life-saving measures are still ongoing as they are in California right now, the consequences can be life and death,” she said.
All aspects of emergency response can be negatively affected by misinformation, Montano said. First responders could face threats of violence for doing their jobs, as some did after Helene. Aid could be slowed, or people could miss applying for it because of lies about availability. In the long term, if people misidentify the causes of a disaster, either intentionally or unintentionally, it makes addressing the actual causes more difficult.
Some misinformation narratives are based at least partially in fact. Fire hydrants did run out of water because of extreme demand. There’s a valid, complex debate on the role of controlled burns in managing destructive fires, and about environmental management practices.
But others are fiction or distortions designed to make political points, exacerbated by California being a blue state during a time of heightened partisanship in the US. Some have been used to deflect from the role climate change plays in exacerbating natural disasters.
Trump, for instance, has called on the Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, to “release the water” from northern parts of the state, despite the state’s water experts saying water supply is not an issue, but rather generators to pump the water.
Recently, false narratives have spread further thanks to prominent voices like Trump and Musk.
“Politicians no longer feel an obligation to the truth in a way that they did at some points, so there’s no punishment to them if they just make something up whole cloth,” Fazio said.
Emergency-management agencies have tried to tamp down false information, putting up websites and social media posts and holding press conferences designed to share facts and clear up rumors. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has an ongoing rumor-response page that has added more factchecks during the LA fires. Newsom put up a site to debunk Trump and others spreading wildfire claims.
The broader issue is a lack of disaster literacy, Montano said: people don’t know what Fema is supposed to do or what the response and recovery from a natural disaster should look like. This allows for misinformation to fill knowledge gaps.
“These agencies are going to have to be much, much more proactive in how they’re addressing this kind of flood of disinformation, and I have not really seen an agency that has figured out how to do that yet,” she said.
