State and federal disaster officials have their hands full trying to save lives and coordinate aid efforts while storms batter the southeast, the latest being Hurricane Milton bearing down on Florida on Wednesday.
Yet officials also have something else to deal with: scores of storm-related antisemitic posts on X, which has earned a reputation for letting hate speech and bogus information proliferate since Elon Musk’s takeover.
The posts falsely claim Jewish people are either causing the extreme weather conditions, purposely hampering Hurricane Helene recovery efforts, or stealing the property of storm victims.
It would be tempting to overlook this and simply let the nutbags and bigots stew in their own hate and ignorance.
Except the posts, and other misinformation about the response to Hurricane Helene, have attracted over 160 million views, according to an analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue — despite being proven wrong by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the White House, other U.S. government agencies and even North Carolina residents.
The 30% of posts that contained overt antisemitism garnered 17.1 million of those 160 million views, the Institute found.
By contrast, FEMA’s own posts drew just 2.6 million views last Saturday and Sunday for its 10 most popular posts.
It’s bad enough that North Carolina and FEMA officials said they fear for their safety from those who might get riled to some sort of negative action as a result of the posts. But the social media comments create “personal safety concern while trying to execute the work needed to move us through this catastrophe,” Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer said to the Washington Post in an email.
Distrust of government is nothing new. Adding on dangerous and unhinged antisemitism and conspiracies only makes the crisis worse.
X could have addressed this — and still can — by following its own guidelines to ban and remove racist and harmful posts. But the platform has been far less willing to go after posts that contain falsehoods and hate speech ever since Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and turned it (inexplicably) into X.
That the tech billionaire continues to let misinformation and hate triumph over facts and truth on the platform is reprehensible.
This latest episode only underscores what we said about X in 2023: “Musk has nearly destroyed the beneficial features of what was once Twitter. Now that he’s killed the bird with his ego and stone-cold foolishness, we wonder how long it’ll take before ‘X’ migrates into oblivion.”
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