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.”
So fucking stupid they think it’s more likely a secret government conspiracy that controls the weather than that it’s AI and AI is shit…
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,” responded Alexa 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-generated entertainment and gaming platform. Within fandom is the Hypothetical Hurricanes Wiki, a “wiki-based comprehensive database of hypothetical tropical cyclone articles that anyone can edit.”
And the government conspiracy is run off fucking fandom.com and accessible by anyone?
If you read the line above that quote: a million views. That’s nothing.
Essentially, a few guys make fun of Alexa, five people take it seriously, three of them are journalists desperately trying to find relevant content.
Every time you read about a “new trend” or “a new challenge” or whatever, you can assume some journalist found three tweets from three 14 year olds all from the same school.
Wow, can someone start a fandom that insists counter conspiracies?
Yet another case of Fandom causing problems for search engines. This happened recently where Fandom’s SEO abuse was causing Google to claim a sequel to Bugsnax was in development, which is not true.
Fandom needs to be shut down. They’re making the internet worse.
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.
Every credible wiki has moved away from fandom at this point. All that’s left is the abandoned shells of the former wikis they refuse to delete and kids who don’t know better.
