We didn't start the fire

My World’s on Fire is a newsletter about disasters from journalist Colleen Hagerty. My goal is to help you feel a bit more at ease about our unpredictable world by equipping you with in-depth reporting and insights. I can only do that with your continued support, so please share and subscribe!

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Well, it’s a new year, but I’m offering a familiar disclaimer – this isn’t what I planned on sending out today. Over the holidays, I worked on a piece for this newsletter looking at a grassroots effort to support the long-term needs of a disaster-struck community, and I’m really looking forward to sharing that with you next week.

It just didn’t feel right today.

I talk a lot about my disaster-focused work in these newsletters for obvious reasons, but I don’t often share much of my other journalism. For years, I’ve covered politics, including local, national, and international elections. I’ve also dug into the influence of tech on politics, from the exciting ability to mobilize and reach voters to the destabilizing threats posed by conspiracy theories.

Since some of those worlds collided yesterday, I wanted to share some thoughts based on my reporting across these realms. Because the same prejudices, privileges, disinformation, and conspiracies on display yesterday aren’t limited to politics – they manifest in multiple areas of our society, including when disasters strike.

This past fall, as wildfires raged across the West, rumors that antifa activists were responsible for starting the flames began spreading across social media. They were echoed on influential platforms, including by President Trump and Joe Rogan. First responders posted pleas to stop sharing these unfounded claims. Eventually, Facebook started removing such posts, which were rampant in some of the grassroots groups often created following disaster events.

“This is consistent with our past efforts to remove content that could lead to imminent harm given the possible risk to human life as the fires rage on,” tweeted Andy Stone, Facebook’s policy communications director.

I’ve been thinking about that today as similarly baseless suggestions are spread and amplified by powerful people.

What happened yesterday was uniquely terrible, but in a number of ways, it was precedented. It built off of and expanded on already existing narratives, networks, and playbooks, with the wildfire rumors just one example.

I struggled with whether I wanted to send this newsletter – I didn’t want it to come across as an attempt to minimize what happened in Washington D.C. or provide an unnecessary disaster connection. But I hope, in a small way, this offers some context around this still-unfolding event. I hope it offers a reminder that it wasn’t isolated to the Capitol or to politics or to one fringe conspiracy or extremist group. And I hope this context can help us recognize these signs in the future.

As always…

thank you for being a part of this community. I’ll be back with more regularly-scheduled content next week, but for now, here’s a little something for reading to the end.

Colleen