Amid Toxic Online Fakery Around the Helene Flood Catastrophe, a Homegrown Videographer Chronicles Reality

How to foster resilience: Boost the distributed capacity to create reality-based connections between communities in peril and the resources they need - from North Carolina to Amazonia.

As you’ve likely seen, the White House, FEMA, Snopes, local sheriffs and elected officials (including some Republicans) have been trying to fight a flood tide of distracting and dangerous online fakery that exploded in the aftermath of devastating deluges triggered by fading Hurricane Helene in the Appalachians.

The Trump campaign and its supporters, including Elon Musk on X, have pumped up the volume.

FEMA’s been peppering platforms with short videos made by its employees debunking lies and has a “rumor response” tool where you can put in search terms and find explanations.

Chimney Rock fakery and reality

Here are two shameful examples, including a tweet claiming “the government is trying to land grab in Chimney Rock, NC. They said they would bulldoze over the piles of bodies today.”

Such crap has garnered millions of views. Allen Breed of the Associated Press has now been to Chimney Rock Village and presented a clearer picture of the damage with on signs of bulldozed bodies or the like.

A direct path from victims to public awareness

Even more promising, to my mind, is the work of Mark Huneycutt, a young YouTuber who lives in Western North Carolina and is best known for the wild videos he posts piloting his powered paragliders through all kinds of adventures. He’s a living case study in how social media and independent communicators outside conventional news media can make a difference.

After the deluge, and riding out on his motorcycle with a chain saw to help his own mountain community, Huneycutt headed into the field, as he describes here in a Facebook post on October 4:

I hiked into Chimney Rock yesterday. I cleared the air about a viral conspiracy which was kind of embarrassing to even pursue and ask officials about but it was creating way too much drama online. Energy should be focused on relief efforts and doing good. We live in a society where if misinformation becomes viral, it's taken as fact.

If you're not following his on-ground, objective video reporting and interviews from the #HeleneFlooding #WNC destruction zone, you're missing out on a rare taste of reality amid the spew of dangerous, polarizing, politicized fakery on X and elsewhere.

Here's a snippet from his Chimney Rock video cutting through the truly dangerous and unfounded allegations about bodies and bulldozing and land grabs in Chimney Rock.

Here's a transcript:

Mark Huneycutt - I'm here in Chimney Rock with Logan. He's been clearing the streets with these guys. We don't smell anything do we?

Logan (young man clearing debris) - No. No. And the smell that was here more than likely the 50 something propoane tanks they took out of the river. They're not bodies in the road - no.

Mark Huneycutt - There's no looting?

Logan - No, no.

Mark Huneycutt - You can't even get in here [he had to hike most of the way].

Logan - No, If you look around. Definitely not. There's more police and military in here than there is workers or people that live here to be honest with you. It's really just a lot of chaos. Everything's ruined. But there's a lot more positive and negative going right now, besides everything that happened.

Mark Huneycutt - So I think because people can't see what's going on in there, someone just created some crazy story and put it out there and it went viral.

Logan - Most definitely. And it's sad what happened and everything, But we're fixing it. And to the extent what, you know, they said that's very farfetched.

Mark Huneycutt - And I walked all the way down here to find out what it looked like down here. And it's just destruction like it is everywhere else. There's nothing crazy going on here. So thanks for doing this cleanup, man.

Logan - Of course.

Here’s the full YouTube video.

He’s also chronicled some stark and horrible accounts that demostrate why no hyperbole is needed.

“I had body bags in my car all day yesterday”

Watch the following video interview with Christy Thrift, the owner of NC Outdoor Adventures, a rafting and tubing concession along the Toe River at Red Hill, a tiny - and now destroyed - settlement. Here’s an excerpt in which she describes how the National Guard had marked dozens of spots along a six-mile stretch of river where there may be bodies.

Thrift has been working nonstop to search for missing neighbors and help those most in need (she’s a swiftwater rescue technician and has been volunteering with the local fire department). I donated on Sunday to a fundraiser for her after following a digital trail that started with Huneycutt’s wrenching interview.

Thanks in large part to Huneycutt’s videos, donations are almost double the ask.

A fundraiser for one of dozens of communities ravaged by Helene flooding

Thrift is posting regular updates on her company’s Facebook page. Here’s Huneycutt’s full video:

The tough reality is that this little nook in the hollows of western North Carolina is just one tiny facet of the sprawling disaster.

The wider opportunity

What you see here is an invaluable aspect of online communication - the capacity (if we choose to support and amplify it) to create direct connections between communities in peril and resources.

The same opportunity exists along the eroding fringes of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil, where Indigenous communicators have, through Instagram and Whatsapp, provided almost instantaneous alerts when land conflicts erupt. One example was a recent attack by rural farmers on a Guarani-Kaiowa encampment in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, with the first evidence coming via Instagram and alerting the giant news organization O Globo.

Here’s a Reuters story as well. At least ten Indigenous people were wounded - fortunately with rubber bullets (a contrast to the murderous situation in Brazil in the 1980s, when I wrote my book The Burning Season.)

There are ways to nurture this ground-up communication capacity both through technology (Starlink, for all Elon Musk’s nightmarish traits, is an amazing tool) and training. I love the work of If Not Us Then Who, for example.