TikTok users are asking Amazon’s Alexa unanswerable questions about the outcome of rapidly strengthening Hurricane Milton, which is forecast to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday. Unfortunately, Alexa is providing users with inaccurate answers, sparking panic and conspiracy theories that have already garnered over a million views on TikTok.
Users are asking variations of the same question: “Alexa, what kind of hurricane was Hurricane Milton?”
“From fandom.com: Hurricane Milton was an extremely powerful Category 5 hurricane that caused widespread damage across its path in October 2024,” respondedAlexa in multiple videos. (Although Media Matters couldn’t replicate the response, Alexa did tell us the death toll and monetary damages of a hurricane that has not yet made landfall when we asked if there were any fatalities from Hurricane Milton).
Alexa’s response cites fandom.com, a fan-generatedentertainment and gaming platform. Within fandom is the Hypothetical Hurricanes Wiki, a “wiki-based comprehensive database of hypothetical tropical cyclone articles that anyone can edit.”
fandom is finally causing good things to happen (spreading misinformation to idiots that use Alexa), it should never absorbed gamepedia but now it is actually being useful.
And you think that people dying is worth it to show that Alexa spreads misinformation?
