Top officials in North Carolina and at the Federal Emergency Management Agency responding to Helene are being subjected to a flurry of antisemitic attacks, causing some of them to fear for their safety as they prepare for another hurricane to strike Florida.
By Will Oremus
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The online vitriol is compounding the challenges facing emergency management officials dealing with the aftermath of Helene and readying a response to Milton, a Category 5 hurricane barreling toward Florida. The volume and virulence of the X posts have dismayed experts who warn that they risk undermining lifesaving response measures.
“We’re seeing an alarming trend of antisemitism being included now in false narratives around pretty much any breaking news event,” said Isabelle Frances-Wright, ISD’s director of technology and society. “This portends a grim outlook for the information ecosystem, both on X itself but also on other platforms where these narratives trickle into and evolve.”
The report focused on 33 recent viral X posts that spread misinformation about Helene, which made landfall in Florida as a major hurricane last month and caused at least 231 deaths and widespread devastation in six states.
The posts collectively attracted 159 million views, even though their claims were thoroughly debunked by local residents, FEMA, the White House and other government officials. Ten of the posts contained antisemitic sentiments and collectively drew 17.1 million views.
In comparison, FEMA, which leads the federal response to Helene, drew just short of 2.6 million views for its 10 most popular posts on Saturday and Sunday.
The report noted that antisemitic sentiments were largely directed at three individual officials: FEMA director of public affairs Jaclyn Rothenberg, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Asheville, N.C., Mayor Esther Manheimer. Many came from accounts that have also trafficked in other forms of misinformation on X, including false claims about Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, the war in Ukraine, and the 2020 presidential election.
As of Monday evening, X had not removed any of the 33 posts, three of which received “community notes” appending fact-checks or additional context to the original post, according to ISD. While X’s rules prohibit hateful tropes or personal attacks based on ethnicity or religion, the company, previously known as Twitter, has pulled back on content moderation and reinstated prominent accounts banned for violating those policies since Musk bought it in 2022.
X did not respond to requests for comment.
FEMA has created a webpage devoted to debunking false rumors about Helene, and Rothenberg has used her professional X account to rebut several falsehoods. The replies to those missives have been studded with antisemitic comments questioning whether she is more loyal to Israel than to the United States because of her Jewish heritage.
The posts attacking Rothenberg racked up more than 4 million views in only 24 hours starting Friday, according to the report. One post accused Rothenberg of “treason” and repeated a false claim by former president Donald Trump that FEMA has used some disaster relief money to help migrants in the United States illegally.
When Rothenberg locked her personal account Friday and Saturday to protect against the abuse, she faced further attacks for doing so. While her verified government account remained unlocked, one user responded, “I thought gov’t accounts could not be protected. She thinks she can hide behind her nose.” (Jews have historically been portrayed in antisemitic films and Nazi propaganda with large, hooked noses, according to the Anti-Defamation League.)
Rothenberg, a political communications veteran who worked for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration and President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, said she has never experienced so much misinformation and abuse.
“The fact that people are spreading misinformation and antisemitism is really disheartening,” she said. “Our jobs are to communicate information that helps people on their worst day, and the misinformation is having a negative impact on the people that need our help the most.”
Another post that has acquired nearly a million views features photos of Rothenberg, Mayorkas and Manheimer and identifies each as “jew.” Spokespeople for the Department of Homeland Security and Mayorkas, a Cuban-born Jew whose relatives were murdered by Nazis, did not respond to a request for comment.
X users have also heavily targeted Manheimer, whose city was deluged by flooding brought by Helene. One post that garnered more than 36,000 views shared a photo of Manheimer accompanied by a caption that played on an antisemitic trope and claimed she “truly hates America.”
Manheimer, who surveyed the damage from Helene during a flight on Marine One with Biden last week, said she worries about her safety and that of other Jewish officials in the hard-hit region.
“Our community’s priority is managing this crisis and addressing the immediate needs that exist in Asheville and Western North Carolina,” Manheimer said in an email, adding that the comments create “a personal safety concern while trying to execute the work needed to move us through this catastrophe.”
The falsehoods online also threatened the safety of the general public, Frances-Wright said.
“When you already have these narratives that the government is bad, that FEMA can confiscate your property, and then you layer on to that FEMA is controlled by the Jewish ‘deep state,’ it just further undercuts people’s trust,” she said.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has apologized for her past embrace of the conspiracy theory that the Rothschild family used lasers from space to start wildfires, repeated a similar trope last week. “Yes they can control the weather,” she wrote on Thursday in an X post. (Greene, who was banned from Twitter in 2022, was among those whose accounts Musk reinstated when he bought the company.)
A spokesman for Greene did not respond to a request for comment.
ISD’s findings track with a trend that researchers have been observing since Musk took over, said Yael Eisenstat, a senior policy fellow at the multi-university research center Cybersecurity for Democracy.
When Musk reinstated the accounts of “so many known extremists and white supremacists,” Eisenstat said, “he signaled to everyone on this platform that engaging in the worst kind of antisemitism and conspiracy theories and targeting people was fair game.”
Andy Carvin, managing editor of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab, said the inability or unwillingness of online platforms such as X to disincentivize the spread of such rhetoric has created a “perfect storm of weather-related disinformation and conspiracy theories intertwining with anti-government paranoia and antisemitic rhetoric.”
“What’s particularly worrying is the potential for online threats to escalate into real-world political violence,” Carvin added. “Federal, state and local emergency management officials have a difficult enough job to do responding to natural disasters, and now some of them are having to deal with doing that very job with a potential target on their backs.”
Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.
