A curious set of claims has recently emerged from the right-wing corners of the social-media platform X: FEMA is systematically abandoning Trump-supporting Hurricane Helene victims; Democrats (and perhaps Jewish people) are manipulating the weather; Haitian immigrants are eating pet cats in Springfield, Ohio. These stories seem absurd to most people. But to a growing number of Americans living in bespoke realities, wild rumors on X carry weight. Political influencers, elites, and prominent politicians on the right are embracing even pathologically outlandish claims made by their base. They know that amplifying online rumors carries little cost—and offers considerable political gain.

Unverified claims that spread from person to person, filling the voids where uncertainty reigns, are as old as human communication itself. Some of the juiciest rumors inspire outrage and contradict official accounts—and from time to time, such a claim turns out to be true. Sharing a rumor is a form of community participation, a way of signaling solidarity with friends, ostracizing some out-group, or both. Political rumors are particularly well suited to the current incarnation of X, a platform that evolved from a place for real-time news and conversations into a gladiatorial arena for partisan fights, owned by a reflexive contrarian with a distaste for media, institutions, and most authority figures.

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When Elon Musk bought the platform, then known as Twitter, in 2022, he argued that it had become too quick to censor heterodox and conservative ideas. “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral,” he said in April 2022, shortly after initiating his purchase, “which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.” But Musk quickly broomed out most of the Trust and Safety team that addressed false and misleading content, along with spam, foreign bots, and other problems. As Musk has drifted to the right—his profile picture now features him in a MAGA hat—the platform he rebranded as X has become the center of a right-wing political culture built upon a fantastical rumor mill. Although false and misleading ideas also spread on Facebook, Telegram, and Trump’s own platform, Truth Social, they move faster and get more views on X—and are likelier to find their way into mainstream political discussion.

Many political rumors on social media begin when people share something they supposedly heard from an indirect acquaintance: The false narrative about pet-eating Haitian immigrants in Springfield started when one woman posted to a Facebook group that her neighbor’s daughter’s friend had lost their cat and had seen Haitians in a house nearby carving it up to eat. Others picked up the story and started posting about it. Another woman shared a screenshot of the Springfield post on X, to bolster her own previous claim that ducks were disappearing from local parks.

Unbound by geography, online rumors can spread very far, very fast; if they gain enough traction, they may trend, drawing still more participants into the discussion. The X post received more than 900,000 views within a few days. Others amplified the story, expressing alarm about Haitian immigrants. No substantive evidence of the wild claims ever emerged.

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Rumors alleging that FEMA was abandoning Trump voters after Helene followed the same pattern: Friend-of-a-friend posts claimed that FEMA was treating Trump supporters unfairly. These claims became entangled in misinformation about what kinds of financial recovery resources the government would provide, and to whom. Claims about abandonment or incompetence were sometimes enhanced by AI-generated images of purported victims designed to tug on the heartstrings, such as a viral picture of a nonexistent child and puppy supposedly adrift in floodwaters. The image spread rapidly on X because it resonated with people who are suspicious of the government—and people who share misleading content rather than question it.

The amplification of emotionally manipulative chatter is a familiar issue on social media. What’s more disconcerting is that Republican political elites—with Musk now among them—are openly legitimizing what the X rumor mill churns out when it serves their objectives. X’s owner has claimed that FEMA is “actively blocking citizens” who are trying to help flood victims in North Carolina, and that it “used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives.” J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, elevated rumors of pet-eating Haitians to national attention on social media for days; Donald Trump did the same in a presidential debate. Influential public figures and political elites—people who, especially in times of crisis, should be acting as voices of reason—are using baseless, often paranoid allegations for partisan advantage.

History shows that the weaponization of rumors can lead to devastating consequences—scapegoating individuals, inciting violence, deepening societal divisions, sparking moral panics, and even justifying atrocities. Yet online rumormongering has immense value to right-wing propagandists. In the 2020 election, Trump and his political allies set the narrative frame from the top: Massive fraud was occurring, Trump claimed, and the election would be stolen from him. The supposed proof came later, in the form of countless online rumors. I and other researchers who watched election-related narratives unfold observed the same pattern again and again: Trump’s true believers offered up evidence to support what they’d been told was true. They’d heard that impersonators were using other people’s maiden names to vote. A friend of a friend’s ballot wasn’t read because they’d used a Sharpie marker. These unfounded claims were amplified by influencers and went viral, even as Twitter tried to moderate them—primarily by labeling and sometimes downranking them. None of them turned out to be true. Even so, today, 30 percent of the public and 70 percent of Republicans still believe the Big Lie that Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump. This simmering sense of injustice is powerful—it spurred violence on January 6, 2021—and continues to foster unrest.

In Ohio recently, claims about supposed Haitian pet-eaters led to dozens of bomb threats, according to state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, who has attempted to correct the record. Local Republican business leaders who praised their Haitian workers received death threats for their troubles. Similarly, fire chiefs and local Republican elected officials pushed back on Helene rumors after FEMA workers were threatened.  

What of left-wing rumors? They exist, of course. After the assassination attempts on Trump, some commentators insinuated that they were “false flag” attacks—in other words, that his camp had staged the incidents to gain public sympathy for him. But mainstream media called out left-wing conspiracism and fact-checked the rumors. The people expressing them were overwhelmingly censured, not encouraged, by fellow influencers and elites on their side of the political spectrum.

In contrast, when social-media companies stepped in to address false claims of voter fraud in 2020, the political influencers who most frequently spread them clamored for retribution, and their allies delivered. Representative Jim Jordan, one of the House’s most powerful Republicans, convened a congressional subcommittee that cast efforts to fact-check and label misleading posts as “censorship.” (Full disclosure: I was one of the panel’s targets.)

Conservatives have reframed fact-checking as a censorship technique by “woke” tech companies and biased journalists. Musk abandoned the practice in favor of Community Notes—which, in theory, allow fellow users to add their own fact-checks and context to any post on the platform. Musk once described Community Notes as a “game changer for combating wrong information”—he understood, correctly, that opening up the fact-checking process to many different voices could better enable consensus about what the truth is. But Community Notes cannot keep up with the rumors roiling X. Notes are absent from some of the most outrageous claims about pet-eating migrants or FEMA malfeasance, which have millions of views. Even as Musk himself has become one of the most prominent boosters of political rumors, Community Notes on Musk’s own tweets have a way of disappearing.

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Musk’s original vision for Twitter may have been just to nudge the platform a bit to the right—toward a more libertarian approach that would bolster it as a free-speech platform while preserving it as the best place to go for breaking news. Instead, figuring out what’s really happening is harder and harder, while X is becoming ever more useful as a place for powerful people to source outrageous material for political propaganda.

Many people across the political spectrum are still on X, of course. The platform has a reported 570 million monthly users, on average. However much Musk’s changes annoyed people on the center and the left, network effects have kept many of them on the platform; those who don’t want to lose friends or followers are likely to keep posting. Yet the market is providing alternative options. Bluesky and Mastodon absorbed some of the extremely online left-leaning users who got fed up first. Threads, an offshoot of Instagram, quickly followed; although the others are still small, Threads has more than 200 million monthly active users. People have other places to go. So do advertisers.

Still, today’s emerging alternative platforms are not a replacement for the Twitter of the late 2010s; real-time news is harder to find, and communities on each of the new entrants have gripes about curation and moderation.

Users who miss the golden age of Twitter still have the option of counterspeech—trying to push back against rumors with good information, and hoping that X’s algorithm will lift it. The question is whether doing so is worth the potential personal cost: Why spend time refuting rumors if your efforts are likely to go largely unseen or bring the wrath of an (unmoderated) mob?

Without a concerted push to defend truth—by leaders, institutions, and the public—the rumor mill will continue to churn, and its distortions will become the foundation of an irreparably divided political landscape. As Hurricane Milton roared across Florida, social-media users were fantasizing, absurdly, about government control of tropical cyclones and making death threats against weather forecasters. Whether Milton-related conspiracy theories will enter the national political discussion isn’t yet clear. But the broad cycle of rumors and threats is becoming depressingly familiar.

Rumors have always circulated, but the decision by Republican politicians and Musk to exploit them has created a problem that’s genuinely new. In the modern right-wing propaganda landscape, where facts are recast as subjective and any authority outside MAGA is deemed illegitimate, eroding trust in institutions is not an unfortunate side effect—it is the goal. And for now, the result is a niche political reality wherein elites on the right, including the world’s richest man, amplify baseless claims without legitimate pushback.

The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!”

As Milton made landfall, causing a series of tornados, a verified account on X reposted a TikTok video of a massive funnel cloud with the caption “WHAT IS HAPPENING TO FLORIDA?!” The clip, which was eventually removed but had been viewed 662,000 times as of yesterday evening, turned out to be from a video of a CGI tornado that was originally published months ago. Scrolling through these platforms, watching them fill with false information, harebrained theories, and doctored images—all while panicked residents boarded up their houses, struggled to evacuate, and prayed that their worldly possessions wouldn’t be obliterated overnight—offered a portrait of American discourse almost too bleak to reckon with head-on.

Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

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Some of the lies and obfuscation are politically motivated, such as the claim that FEMA is offering only $750 in total to hurricane victims who have lost their home. (In reality, FEMA offers $750 as immediate “Serious Needs Assistance” to help people get basic supplies such as food and water.) Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Fox News have all repeated that lie. Trump also posted (and later deleted) on Truth Social that FEMA money was given to undocumented migrants, which is untrue. Elon Musk, who owns X, claimed—without evidence—that FEMA was “actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own. It’s very real and scary how much they have taken control to stop people helping.” That post has been viewed more than 40 million times. Other influencers, such as the Trump sycophant Laura Loomer, have urged their followers to disrupt the disaster agency’s efforts to help hurricane victims. “Do not comply with FEMA,” she posted on X. “This is a matter of survival.”

The result of this fearmongering is what you might expect. Angry, embittered citizens have been harassing government officials in North Carolina, as well as FEMA employees. According to an analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an extremism-research group, “Falsehoods around hurricane response have spawned credible threats and incitement to violence directed at the federal government,” including “calls to send militias to face down FEMA.” The study also found that 30 percent of the X posts analyzed by ISD “contained overt antisemitic hate, including abuse directed at public officials such as the Mayor of Asheville, North Carolina; the FEMA Director of Public Affairs; and the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.” The posts received a collective 17.1 million views as of October 7.

Online, first responders are pleading with residents, asking for their help to combat the flood of lies and conspiracy theories. FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said that the volume of misinformation could hamper relief efforts. “If it creates so much fear that my staff doesn’t want to go out in the field, then we’re not going to be in a position where we can help people,” she said in a news conference on Tuesday. In Pensacola, Florida, Assistant Fire Chief Bradley Boone vented his frustrations on Facebook ahead of Milton’s arrival: “I’m trying to rescue my community,” he said in a livestream. “I ain’t got time. I ain’t got time to chase down every Facebook rumor … We’ve been through enough.”

It is difficult to capture the nihilism of the current moment. The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials. But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit. Similarly, those sharing the lies are happy to admit that they do not care whether what they’re pushing is real or not. Such was the case last week, when Republican politicians shared an AI-generated viral image of a little girl holding a puppy while supposedly fleeing Helene. Though the image was clearly fake and quickly debunked, some politicians remained defiant. “Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” Amy Kremer, who represents Georgia on the Republican National Committee, wrote after sharing the fake image. “I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.”

Kremer wasn’t alone. The journalist Parker Molloy compiled screenshots of people “acknowledging that this image is AI but still insisting that it’s real on some deeper level”—proof, Molloy noted, that we’re “living in the post-reality.” The technology writer Jason Koebler argued that we’ve entered the “‘Fuck It’ Era” of AI slop and political messaging, with AI-generated images being used to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.

This has all been building for more than a decade. On The Colbert Report, back in 2005, Stephen Colbert coined the word truthiness, which he defined as “the belief in what you feel to be true rather than what the facts will support.” This reality-fracturing is the result of an information ecosystem that is dominated by platforms that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and large event into a shameless content-creation opportunity. This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance than change their fundamental beliefs about the world. But the misinformation crisis is not always what we think it is.

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So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information. What is clear from comments such as Kremer’s is that she is not a dupe; although she may come off as deeply incurious and shameless, she is publicly admitting to being an active participant in the far right’s world-building project, where feel is always greater than real.

What we’re witnessing online during and in the aftermath of these hurricanes is a group of people desperate to protect the dark, fictitious world they’ve built. Rather than deal with the realities of a warming planet hurling once-in-a-generation storms at them every few weeks, they’d rather malign and threaten meteorologists, who, in their minds, are “nothing but a trained subversive liar programmed to spew stupid shit to support the global warming bullshit,” as one X user put it. It is a strategy designed to silence voices of reason, because those voices threaten to expose the cracks in their current worldview. But their efforts are doomed, futile. As one dispirited meteorologist wrote on X this week, “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes.” She followed with: “I can’t believe I just had to type that.”

What is clear is that a new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political. Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality. If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality, as well as those who have financial and political interests in keeping up the charade.

In one sense, these attacks—and their increased desperation—make sense. The world feels dark; for many people, it’s tempting to meet that with a retreat into the delusion that they’ve got everything figured out, that the powers that be have conspired against them directly. But in turning away, they exacerbate a crisis that has characterized the Trump era, one that will reverberate to Election Day and beyond. Americans are divided not just by political beliefs but by whether they believe in a shared reality—or desire one at all.