Videos containing misinformation and conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene have earned millions of views on YouTube, including several monetized videos, according to a Media Matters review.
After Hurricane Helene made landfall in the southeastern United States in late September, misinformation and conspiracy theories — ranging from accusations that FEMA is failing to mobilize resources to hard-hit areas to conspiracy theories that the government controls the weather — have proliferated across right-wing media and social media platforms. Officials have repeatedly urged people to stop spreading this misinformation and put out rebuttals to some of the false claims, warning that the misinformation could hamper recovery efforts.
Media Matters has found that the misinformation and conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene have also spread on YouTube. According to a review of YouTube videos using the tracking tool BuzzSumo, at least 44 videos created through October 8 have pushed at least one strand of this misinformation. These videos have earned nearly 2.5 million combined views, even as they falsely claim that FEMA disaster aid went to undocumented immigrants, baselessly allege there was some secret plot to “grab” land to obtain resources, and suggest that the hurricane was evidence of some kind of weather manipulation.
YouTube has also seemingly profited from some of these videos. At least 9 of the videos are monetized with preroll ads and/or have received donations via the “Super Chat” feature. (The feature enables viewers to pay creators to highlight their comments during a livestream; YouTube takes a roughly 30% cut of Super Chat revenue.)
Some of the monetized videos push the false claim that FEMA does not have money for Hurricane Helene relief efforts because it gave money to undocumented immigrants. In reality, the government has said it has sufficient funds for Helene, and funding for migrants comes from a “separate funding source with a separate purpose covering separate years,” as noted by NPR.
We observed preroll ads on videos with titles such as “FEMA is RUNNING OUT of money for hurricane victims, but gave BILLIONS to ILLEGALS?!”; “FEMA Confiscating Helene donations for the ILLEGALS!!”; and “Pennies for Americans, Billions for Illegals: FEMA Boondoggle.”
Other videos, titled “FEMA Puts Illegals Over Americans” and “Democrats Gave FEMA AID To ILLEGAL MIGRANTS, Helene Victims GET NONE,” featured Super Chat donations.
Media Matters found at least two other monetized videos that pushed conspiracy theories about the hurricane and response. One video, which had prerolls ads and received donations via Super Chats, was titled, “Asheville Lithium Terraforming We Decoded on 6-9” — a reference to the false conspiracy theory that “people engineered the hurricane to clear land in North Carolina to mine lithium, a metal used to power batteries for electric vehicles, smartphones and laptop computers.”
Another video, which featured preroll ads, had in its title, “WEATHER MANIPULATION Reality!?” and “HAARP & Cloud Seeding,” promoting the false conspiracy theory that Hurricane Helene was related to weather manipulation.
