Summary
It's meteorologists' job to warn residents about destructive storms — but political polarization has made them targets online.
Meteorologists Get Death Threats as Hurricane Milton Conspiracy Theories Thrive
As Hurricane Milton approaches Florida, meteorologists are staying awake for days at a time trying to get vital, life-saving information out to the folks who will be affected. That’s their job. But this year, several of them tell Rolling Stone, they’re increasingly having to take time out to quell the nonstop flow of misinformation during a particularly traumatic hurricane season. And some of them are doing it while being personally threatened.
“People are just so far gone, it’s honestly making me lose all faith in humanity,” says Washington, D.C.based meteorologist Matthew Cappucci, in a phone interview conducted while he was traveling down to Florida for the storm. “There’s so much bad information floating around out there that the good information has become obscured.”
Cappucci says that he’s noticed an enormous change on social media in the past three months: “Seemingly overnight, ideas that once would have been ridiculed as very fringe, outlandish viewpoints are suddenly becoming mainstream, and it’s making my job much more difficult.”
He says meteorologists and disaster relief experts have to strike a balance between putting out helpful, high-quality information while also squashing misinformation. “Nowadays, there’s so much bad information out there that if we spent our time getting rid of it, we’d have no more time.”
This hurricane season, Cappucci and the other meteorologists I spoke with say, conspiracy theories have been flooding their inboxes. The main one that people have seemed to latch onto is the accusation that the government can control the weather. This theory seems to be amplified with climate change creating worsening storms combined with a tense election year, and the vitriol is being directed at meteorologists. “I’ve been doing this for 46 years, and it’s never been like this,” says Alabama meteorologist James Spann. He says he’s been “inundated” with misinformation and threatening messages like “Stop lying about the government controlling the weather or else.”
The story continues in Rolling Stone.
