How Hacks Happen

Wildfire Clickbait: Milking a Disaster on Social Media

• Many Worlds Productions • Season 3 • Episode 12

Share episode

In the wake of the devastating California wildfires, conspiracy theories abound, some of them with no basis in fact. Just after her Pasadena home was threatened by the fires, author Su Falcon ran into a wall of disinformation in social media. Find out what she did about it, and how you can help keep the internet free of this kind of destructive garbage.

Resources


Send us a text

Everyday AI: Your daily guide to grown with Generative AI
Can't keep up with AI? We've got you. Everyday AI helps you keep up and get ahead.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Support the show

Join our Patreon to listen ad-free!

Wildfire Clickbait

Welcome to How Hacks Happen. I’m your host Michele Bousquet, and in this episode we’ll be taking a look at a rather broad topic: misinformation on the internet. Obviously I can’t cover this topic in its entirety in one episode, but we will zoom in to one that’s been all over the internet lately: the wildfires in California. And we’ll hear about one woman’s battle against not just the fires themselves, but also against all the misinformation that’s been spreading around the internet like, well, wildfire.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, you’ve heard about the wildfires that blazed across the Los Angeles area of California, moving out of the forests and into highly populated areas. Thousands of people have lost their homes, including many Hollywood celebrities. And while the fires are now, after several days, contained within specific areas, the fires are still burning, and will likely continue to burn for days or even weeks to come.

While thousands of houses and buildings have burned to the ground, representing many billions of dollars’ worth of property, very few lives have been lost, relatively speaking. This, at least, is something to be thankful for.

And another side to this tragedy is that it has really brought out the internet trolls. 

In case you’re not familiar with the term, a troll is someone who posts online with the specific intention of stirring up trouble. We’ve all seen trolls in action, posting ignorant or insulting comments that contribute nothing to the conversation and are just plain irritating. That’s a troll. 

Trolls especially like tragedies, because it gives them an opportunity to feed on peoples’ distress and uncertainty by posting misinformation and especially conspiracy theories, all just to get likes and clicks and attention. 

Many of us just ignore the trolls. But for one woman, fighting the trolls that were feeding on the Los Angeles wildfires, became a passion. 

You’re about to meet Su Falcon, an author based in Pasadena, California. Su lives a stone’s throw from Altadena, a city that was more than 50% destroyed by fire last week. 

Su is a professional writer, and is also developing a board game called Disasters Happen, which caused her to research a lot of natural disasters. That’s just a little ironic here since she was forced to become even more acquainted with the nature and impact of one of those disasters, wildfires, through no choice of her own.

Michele: Tell me the story of what you were doing, what happened…

Su: It’s been an exhausting couple of weeks. When the windstorm started a week ago Tuesday, I was not so concerned. We've had wind storms many times over the years. Around 10 o'clock that night, a friend of mine who lives…

Michele: Su got a call from a friend up in Altadena, where the fires were really starting to encroach. I should mention that the call had to do with evacuating her friend’s backyard chickens. There’s actually a pretty sizeable chicken community in Pasadena and Altadena, including Su herself. She even wrote a book about it called “How I Survived My First Year with Chickens.” So yeah, Su was the right call for her friend. 

Su: As soon as she called me, I started going online and Googling to see what was actually going on and where the real dangerous areas were and so on and so forth. And of course, I have notices popping up on social media, left, right and center.

Su: So I'm looking at what people are saying. And the first thing that just struck me as wrong was all the people on various apps. And this is Nextdoor, Facebook, the Ring app. They’re posting questions saying, do I need to evacuate?

And first of all, you're not saying where you are. So that's a really hard question to answer. And second, why are you going to social media to get this information? It's not the best source. So I found some links that actually gave the information these people were looking for. And I spent the next three hours posting the correct links every time I see somebody asking a question like this.

Michele: The websites Su is talking about are watchduty.org and airnow.gov, two of the official websites for wildfire information.

Michele: Now, at this point, Su is still at home in Pasadena. But as the fires raged on in Altadena less than a mile away, Su eventually had to evacuate herself. She managed to get to a friend’s place 20 miles south, far from any of the danger zones. But in the hustle of leaving, Su took only a few items with her.

Su: All I had was my phone and my iPad so I didn't have much I could do except go on social media and try to put out the misinformation fires and they were just springing up everywhere I mean the first thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was when I started seeing certain political figures, who were politicizing the fire and pointing fingers and saying, this is the fault, not the responsibility, but the fault of this person or that person, and aren't they horrible, and burning California to the ground. And that just set off a whole wave of theories that, you know, one person would come up with a theory. This is the way it works. Somebody comes up with a theory. It's just like, you know, they're trying to string some elements together and they post something and they say, well, it could be this. Well, that's Joe who says that. And Fred sees what Joe pointed and he goes, oh, well, I'm seeing it on social media, so it must be true. Let's forward this to the world because everybody needs to know this.

Su: Doesn't bother to validate any of the information, doesn't bother to do any kind of a fact check, but just forwards it. And by the time it gets to Sarah, Betsy, Henry, and Ralph, they are all spreading it on their channels, and this has become an entire spider web of misinformation that is unsupported by anything. And this is what I've been seeing, you know? Like all these fires were started by arson, all these fires were started by the electric company, all these fires were started by… you know, and they just they get wilder and wilder. You know, I'm still waiting for somebody to say it's the aliens that did it. The government is burning up California because, why? What is to be gained from this? Oh, right! The Olympics. We're going to rebuild the city in the vision of an Olympic village. Yeah, that's not going to happen in four years. I'm sorry. There are a million of these theories out there, and each one is less substantial than the one before it. 

Su: Now, the stuff about what Newsom did and did not do, I don't have facts on any of that. Neither do the people that I see posting the most inflaming posts. You know, they think they do, but you know as well as I do that people don't know how to research on the Internet. They do a Google search and think they've done something good because Google hands them what they want to see. 

Michele: They see a TikTok or a Reddit post. 

Su: Yeah, and I mean, you know, if you want to think the earth is flat, you're going to find things to support that in Google, you know, and it'll be really convincing.

The conspiracy theories Su refers to are, well, unbelievable. California governor Gavin Newsom cut the firefighter budget before the fires. Not true, in fact the budget was doubled. Newsom arranged to have Los Angeles burned down to make way for a “city of the future”. Uh, I don’t think so, there’s no evidence for this. And this “city of the future” thing has been tried before in other countries, and despite millions of dollars being spent, the city was a failure. So why would anybody try it in Los Angeles? 

Want to hear a few more? Of course you do! Water was restricted because of a small endangered fish called the Delta Smelt. Also not true. And my favorite: Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass deliberately set the fires to destroy secret tunnels designed for child trafficking. Sorry, I had a hard time keeping a straight face with that one. This kind of thing is actually a sort of troll favorite. Bring up the pedos, and the crowd goes wild.

Some other ones were, the fires caused by satanic rituals, and Newsom confiscated Starlink devices. The Hollywood sign was on fire. All false. Well, I guess we can never be sure about the satanic rituals–you never know what other people are doing–but the other two are easy to disprove.

You can’t make this stuff up. Well, actually you can. That’s what trolls do. Just ask the parents who lost children in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. 

As if losing a child to a senseless killing isn’t bad enough, podcaster Alex Jones made it worse by repeatedly putting forth a conspiracy theory that Sandy Hook didn’t actually happen, that it was fake news for the sole purpose of promoting restrictions on guns. Jones said the grieving parents were faking it, that they were “crisis actors,” just people hired by those tricky anti-gun lobbyists to cry on camera. Jones started up with this business the day after the shooting, and even called out the parents by name when making these accusations.

Some of Jones’s followers took it upon themselves to start harassing these grieving parents by posting vile messages on social media, even on the children’s memorial pages. One family moved 3000 miles away from where Sandy Hook took place shortly after the tragedy, but Jones’s army found them and posted their address publicly online. Even four years after the shooting, one of the parents was confronted on the street by one of Jones’s followers, who angrily demanded to know how he could sleep at night, knowing he was a crisis actor.

Can you imagine? Several of these poor harassed parents eventually sued Alex Jones for defamation. Jones was found guilty, and ordered to pay over a billion dollars in restitution. And Jones eventually admitted that he knew Sandy Hook was real, and that he was lying the whole time.

So why did he do all this? Well, for money. Jones had an online store, and he used conspiracy theories to get followers, and then heavily promoted his products to them. And he made millions every year, doing just that.

Anyway, my point is that Alex Jones trolled his followers with bad information. The problem wasn’t necessary so much that Jones spouted lies. The bigger problem was that people believed them.

Certain types of people seem to love conspiracy theories. Flat earthers, Holocaust deniers, Moon landing hoaxers… I’ve had my own run-ins with conspiracy theorists, and I can tell you that even when shown facts, like me saying “I was there, I saw it with my own eyes, and what you’re saying is not true,” conspiracy theorists will still believe what they want to believe. They trust their intuition more than facts, possibly because they lack confidence in their own ability to tell fact from fiction. I don’t know. They also seem to get some comfort for finding someone to blame for their own discomfort. 

It’s tough going, trying to have a logical conversation with a conspiracy theorist, and I’ve found it best to just let them go off and believe what they want to believe. As long as their beliefs aren’t harming anyone else, I’ve got no problem with it.

I have a bigger problem with people who promote conspiracy theories just for the likes and follows, without regard for how much damage they’re causing. 

During a crisis, people are desperate for answers, and not necessarily in their right mind. Imagine that you’ve just heard your parents had to evacuate their gorgeous California home and that house will probably burn down. In a heightened emotional state, you read one of the lies I described earlier, say, something about Governor Newsom mismanaging funds, and you know what you need to do–you need to repeat it on social media. 

Yeah, No. Don’t do that. While it might feel good for your distressed emotional state to have a direct target for all your anger and fear and sadness, ultimately this misdirection is not the greatest thing. It doesn’t help solve the problem of the wildfires, and can even get in the way of future prevention, when the governor’s office wastes time dealing with calls from constituents demanding that the governor stop doing something that he’s actually not doing. 

Allow me to elaborate. Suppose a few months go by, after you make that social media post about that rumor, and you’ve been proven wrong. Are you going to (a) go on social media and say oops, I was wrong, I’m sorry, or (b) double down and insist that it must be true, because you believe it? Some people are incapable of admitting when they were wrong, and they will instead keep on insisting and insisting that they were right, even when the evidence that they were wrong is right in front of their face. I’ve experienced this first-hand, with the person just turning to me and saying, “Well, I believe what I believe.” Okay, then. You just go do you.

And this is one reason why conspiracy theories live on. Once you’re in it up to your knees, it’s a lot cozier to just stay there in the nice warm mud than to try and slog your way out. 

And conspiracy theories are nothing new. They’ve been around way longer than the internet. From rumors that the Roman emperor Nero faked his death (in the year 68 AD), to rumors that Elvis Presley didn’t actually die in 1977, he just went into hiding. They’re both conspiracy theories, just 1900 years apart.

Before the internet, we were all accustomed to hearing the odd conspiracy theory from someone at work or school or maybe even on TV, and we might even have welcomed one as a point of discussion at the dinner table. We’d bat it around, we’d try and poke holes in it, maybe get inspired to go to the library and do a little research about it, and then come home and tell everybody else.

But these days, with the internet, there’s no time for discussion or reflection on a conspiracy theory posted on social media. The theory is shared instantly with 10, 100, or one thousand, or one hundred thousand people. And with those numbers, odds are, that some of the viewers are not in the best state of mind, they’re a little vulnerable. But instead of bringing it up over the dinner table and getting a reality check, their stressed-out mind takes it in and makes it true.

So when QAnon, a conspiracy theory group, claims that politicians are involved in child sex trafficking…wait a minute, didn’t we just hear that one again with regard to the California wildfires? That’s right, it’s an oldie but goodie. Anyway, when you hear that one, there’s no one around to say, “Hey, um, I don’t think that’s true. What’s the proof behind it? There isn’t any? Hmm.”

Which brings me to my final point. When the internet gained popularity in the 1990s, those of us deep in the tech world, we were filled with hope. The internet would give everyone access to knowledge, and that would be amazing. Mankind could advance by leaps and bounds, and there would be no more pointless arguments about facts. You’d just be able to look it up.

Well, that one kind of backfired in our faces. Because in addition to real true facts, like, say, the year Isaac Newton was born or how the light bulb was invented, people now also have access to ridiculous rumors and lies. And there’s a portion of our population that believes everything they see in the media or on the internet. Can you believe that?

Audio bite from Presidential Debate 2024:

Donald J. Trump: In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.

Moderator: I just want to clarify, here you bring up Springfield, Ohio, and ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.

Trump: Well, I’ve seen people on television. The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food. 

Apparently, not even our leaders are immune from it.

One of the reasons so much misinformation gets spread around is that our social media platforms are built for engagement, not accuracy. It’s all about the clicks and likes and posts and shares. Social media doesn’t care whether the information you’re being fed is total garbage. In fact, it seems to give preference to click-baity, sensational headlines. 

Here’s an example: If you saw a headline that said “Climate Change is Coming” and another that said “Cheez-Its made my toddler’s head explode,” which would you be more likely to click on? Climate change just isn’t very appealing, but watching a kid go absolutely crazy for crackers, I’d kind of like to see that.

And in these times of uncertainty, conspiracy theories offer comfort and easy answers, ones that make us nod our heads and go, “Yep, that explains it!”

This attitude can temporarily make you feel a little better, but it won’t solve anything long term. 

I think Su expresses it very well.

Su: People please, stop posting things that you don't know that are true and particularly stop posting things that are designed to inflame the people who read your post. I have said over and over again, between the fire and the smoke, we have enough flames to deal with without you adding to it.

When you see some wild conspiracy theory online, or even a not-so-wild one, take a moment before sharing it. Have you checked that it’s true? If it’s not true, or you can’t find out, would you please keep your finger off the share button? And call out the person who posted it and ask them, “What is your source for this information?” It doesn’t take much to nip this kind of thing in the bud, and keep misinformation from spreading like, you know, wildfire.

That’s our episode for today. I wish upon you a very happy week, one that is free of conspiracy theories. Except the one about birds not being real. That one’s actually true! Well, maybe not. But at least, believing in it won’t harm anyone. See you next time on How Hacks Happen.