Tracking the deadly flooding in Texas and elsewhere, false information from right- and left-wing users was spreading across social media. Liberals were blatantly blaming staffing cuts at US meteorological agencies as the cause of failing warning systems, while conservatives were promoting conspiracy theories.
The devastating floods that hit the weekend have killed more than 100 people, including around two dozen children and their counselors at a camp by the river and rescuers raced on Tuesday to find hundreds of missing people.
A number of left-leaning accounts on platform X propagated the false assertion that cuts to staff within the National Weather Service (NWS) under President Trump’s Administration had “degraded” its forecasting ability.
Although the NWS as well as other agencies, has faced significant budget cuts and staffing reductions in Trump’s administration, its forecasters have risen to the occasion. Trump administration. However, the experts believe its forecasters stepped up to the challenge despite the restrictions.
“There have been claims that (weather agencies) did not foresee catastrophic (Texas) floods — but that’s simply not true,” Daniel Swain an atmospheric researcher at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources and a contributor to Bluesky.
“This was undoubtedly an extreme event but messaging rapidly escalated beginning (around) 12 (hours) prior…Locations that flooded catastrophically had at least 1-2+ hours of direct warning from NWS.”
There were 22 warnings issued by the NWS for Kerr County and the Kerrville region, which was hit by the most severe flooding according to an CBS News analysis.
“This was an incredibly huge and sudden event that took place at the most inconvenient moment (middle of the evening). However, the issue was, it wasn’t an unfavorable weather forecast: it was a last-mile forecasts/warning,” Swain wrote.
In the meantime, conspiracy theorists of the right on social media have falsely said that it was the federal government who triggered the flooding by seeding clouds which is a synthetic technique which stimulates rain.
Many experts have suggested that these technologies for weather modification were not the cause of these floods in Texas floods.
The misinformation is in line with previous conspiracy theories, such as assertions that weather manipulation by the federal government caused the hurricane Milton — which hit the Florida Gulf Coast last year – and that cloud seeding strategies were the cause of last year’s floods in Dubai.
“Classic tale of misinformation’
“False claims from both the left and right have spread widely on social media following the catastrophic floods in Texas,” Sarah Komar and Nicole Dirks from the disinformation watchdog NewsGuard released a study that disproved a variety of myths.
“When extreme weather events occur, conspiracy theories about humans creating or controlling them often soon follow.”
In the aftermath of natural disasters, misinformation is often a major issue on social media, fuelled by accounts from all over the political spectrum as platforms reduce content moderation and cut down on their use of human fact-checkers.
Traditional media outlets weren’t free of the misinformation that circulated online.
“Like other disasters before it, the Texas floods had attracted fast-spreading misinformation and served as a warning about the vigilance required of journalists during emotionally charged news events,” said the non-profit Media Institute Poynter.
Kerr County Lead, a local publication was forced to pull back an untrue story about the miraculous recovery of two young girls held on to a tree during the floods. The story first appeared on social media and quickly went viral, however local officials said that the stories are “100% inaccurate.”
“Like everyone, we wanted this story to be true, but it’s a classic tale of misinformation that consumes all of us during a natural disaster,” Louis Amestoy, the editor of Kerr County Lead, wrote in a letter for readers to read on Sunday.”Unfortunately, the story is not true, and we are retracting it.”
