What’s most astounding is that they judged, accurately, I think, that they had to take this one seriously.
There is a direct relationship between the stupidity and paranoia of right wing social media, and the severity of the disasters and humiliations we have been facing in the last year.
A powerful winter storm has left millions of people without power in Texas amid freezing temperatures.
Some Facebook users blamed President Joe Biden — not for a particular policy, but for the storm itself.
In a Feb. 15 post, Scott L. Biddle wrote that the storm resulted from “weather manipulation and controlling the jet stream” — something he assured people is “not a conspiracy theory.”
“Joe Biden’s ‘Dark Winter’ statement was not a random thought, it was a foreshadow of what was to come,” Biddle wrote. “Texas is the only state to have its own, entirely independent electric grid separate from the rest of the United States. This is warfare, an attack on Texas by altering the jet stream, seeding the clouds, and ultimately causing the storm that blacked out over 4 million people.”
“Sound crazy? Too hard to believe? Believe it.”
Don’t believe it.
The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) We reached out to Biddle — who wrote a book of COVID-19 conspiracy theories that was removed from Amazon — but we haven’t heard back.
What he said isn’t true.
First, let’s examine the “‘dark winter’ statement.” In November, Biden said the coronavirus pandemic could worsen over the winter months as Americans traveled for the holidays and were forced indoors by colder weather.
“We’re still facing a very dark winter,” he said. “There are now nearly 10 million COVID cases in the United States.”
Biden was not predicting a winter storm — he was predicting an influx of new daily COVID-19 cases and deaths, which hit record highs in early January and February, consecutively.
Now onto the Facebook post’s claim about Texas’ power grid. In 1970, the state created the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to avoid regulation from the federal government. The electric grid is not subject to the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
However, that doesn’t mean the Biden administration altered the weather to attack Texas’ energy infrastructure.
The winter storm first hit the Pacific Northwest between Feb. 12-13, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power. Then, it moved through the Southwest before hitting the central and southern plains.
The storm resulted from a polar vortex that brought Arctic air from Canada to many parts of the U.S. A polar vortex is a large area of low pressure and cold air surrounding the Earth’s poles. It weakens in the summer and strengthens in the winter, when the vortex expands and sends cold air southward with the jet stream.
The jet stream is the product of strong winds created by Earth’s rotation on its axis — it would not be possible for the government to somehow step in and shake things up. The only measurable effect humans are thought to have on the jet stream is through climate change.
“Cloud seeding,” on the other hand, is a real technique that’s sometimes used to produce moisture in drought-prone areas. Aircraft inject particles into clouds to encourage water droplets to freeze around them. In the right conditions, the process can create snow. Again, that’s not what is happening in Texas and many other parts of the country.
Cloud seeding has been cited as evidence for the chemtrails conspiracy theory, which falsely claims the government uses aircraft to spray chemicals in the sky to control the population. We found posts from Biddle in groups dedicated to the conspiracy theory.
The post is inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!
The BBC just reported that some Texans (~ 400 K) have not had any power for four days. They also mentioned this was a minor political crisis for Ted Cruz who is vacationing in sunny Cancun. Another example of Karma?
This is not disinformation — it’s just jaw slacking idiocy. Gracing it with attempts at censorship will make people wary and suspicious.
Not sure what you’re complaining about– labeling this as ‘Pants on Fire’ is not censorship. This conspiracy stuff is idiotic but it’s also influential– and far too many people are already disposed to take it seriously (years of deliberate distraction in right-wing media haven’t helped– see Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”).
Congratulations to FB for a rare act of intelligence in tossing this nonsense. And the opposite to every media outlet that undid that act by trumpeting it a hundred times louder after. A nutcase’s dream–living off the media coverage about what can now be called a coverup.
Don’t try to negate false frames by repeating & reinforcing them. If something bad is banned, leave it that way.
The same people who like to blame chemtrails for all sorts of significant effects on us can’t possibly accept that the GHGs that aircraft inject high into our atmosphere could affect how our planet retains heat.