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 last 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.”
How easy would it be for a foreign power to use inexpensive bot nets to amplify misinformation on a truly industrial scale on what are, essentially, unregulated social media platforms? Turns out the results are in and (a) it’s very easy and (b) it’s incredibly effective at sowing distrust and fear.
It’s time to regulate social media folks. The “free speech” excuse has been proven demonstrably false by Musk, Zuckerberg et al.
