Today’s notice: How to deal with conspiracy theories, how to confront history on the campaign trail, how not to prepare for an election.
To engage or not engage is an age-old question for officials when it comes to conspiracies. But the speed and volume at which conspiracy theories have spread about Hurricane Helene and now Hurricane Milton caught many in the government off guard, threatening recovery efforts. So they attempted to engage.
As Milton made landfall, I called the White House to talk about Reddit. The Biden administration started posting on the social media platform this week, meeting some of the conspiracies about FEMA where they grow. A White House official told me somewhere between 3 to 4 million people saw a post from the administration explaining that, in fact, “FEMA cannot seize your property or land,” in the first several hours it was online.