How a viral rumor about FEMA ended in real threats of violence

The latest viral misinformation about the recovery efforts following hurricane Helene in North Carolina is a claim that a FEMA director was physically beaten by locals who were angry about FEMA’s response to the deadly disaster. I dug into this claim soon after it started making the rounds, and thus far I haven’t found any information or sources that corroborate it, but I did find plenty of contradictory evidence disputing its veracity. But mostly, I just found a lot of angry and violent posts cheering on the idea of a federal official being violently assaulted while doing their job — with very little pushback and almost no attempts to figure out if the incident even happened at all. 

The unmitigated spread of this unfounded claim provides a startling example of a data void, and a stark reminder of why it is so important to stay ahead of the narrative engineers who are trying to shape our collective memory of what happened by indirectly controlling the information that we see, and, just as importantly, what we don’t see. Most disturbing of all, this incident is one of the clearest examples that I’ve ever seen of how online rhetoric can directly motivate and guide offline violence through the use of storytelling to reframe political violence as not just acceptable, but as a necessary — heroic, even —  act of survival carried out by desperate people who are cast as both the victims and the heroes of the story. I’ll get into that more in a future piece, but for right now, let’s look at how this baseless narrative emerged, went viral, and jumped platforms before a single attempt was made to fact-check the story — and what the consequences were of failing to fill that data void with verified information. 

The reports of a FEMA director being assaulted appear to have originated with a tweet from a pro-Trump Twitter account, which was shared more than 20,000 times and garnered more than 100,000 “likes” and 6.4 million views in the first 19 hours after it was posted on Friday morning. Several hours later, a pro-Trump meme account followed up on the initial claim with a tweet that repeated — nearly verbatim — what was posted by the first user, but with the addition of a video clip for extra effect. The tweet was clearly intended to make people think that the video — which depicted a woman being violently thrown to the ground, with money falling out of her pockets or purse — was actual footage of the alleged assault of a FEMA director. However, a quick reverse image search from a still-shot of the video shows that the clip is and ally from a 2023 incident in which a security guard threw a woman to the ground outside of a Texas nightclub. Still, the unfounded rumor continued picking up steam online. A couple of hours later, another pro-Trump account tweeted the same video clip, along with a tweet containing the verbatim text from the initial post. In what appears to be an interesting attempt to save face, the user then returned to their tweet a couple hours later and claimed that they had posted the video “for effect only,” as if they weren’t trying to pass the video off as footage of the alleged attack. 

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