Online disinformation exacerbates Spain flood disaster

MADRID: The disinformation inundating social media during Spain’s catastrophic floods threatened the crucial work of emergency services and exploited fear, anger and grief, an AFP investigation has found.
The European nation’s worst floods in a generation have killed more than 210 people, left dozens missing and submerged entire towns in mud, particularly in the eastern Valencia region.
False messages multiplied on the web as torrential rains lashed Spain on Oct 29, with one targeting residents living near the Magro and Mijares rivers who saw an evacuation warning supposedly issued by the authorities.
Although officials warned locals to stay away from the riverbanks, they never asked them to leave their homes as the fake messages claimed.
The Virtual Operations Support Team, an association of volunteers who monitor social media during crises, told AFP such misinformation sparks chaos.
It risked seeing panicked residents scrambling to leave their towns “in a disorderly way” on motorways destroyed by the floods, “blocking access to emergency vehicles”, it said.
Equally dangerous for public security was a message claiming to provide an alternative emergency number to call if the official 112 line was down.
Such was the quantity of disinformation during the first two days of the disaster that the Valencia region’s leader Carlos Mazon and fire service chief Jose Miguel Basset felt compelled to intervene.
“They’ve spoken about evacuations, overflowing, the bursting of dams: none of that has been correct, but it has notably interrupted the emergency services’ work,” said Basset.
Popular fury at the authorities for their perceived inaction before and after the devastation led to a search for culprits and another source of misinformation – the government’s alleged “destruction of dams”.
The narrative has existed for a while in Spain without ever being substantiated.
In 2023, the AEMS – Rivers with Life association told AFP that dismantled, disused or ruined dams could cause or exacerbate floods. But Spain has destroyed no large dam in recent years.
Some internet users sprung on the disaster to claim the exceptionally powerful Mediterranean storm that triggered it was the work of “climate geoengineering”, ruling out the influence of climate change which they deny.
However, the science is clear. Neither so-called “chemtrails” – streaks of condensation in the sky left by planes – nor the HAARP project that studies the Earth’s outer atmosphere were behind the storm.
The rainfall was 12 per cent heavier and twice as likely compared to the world before global warming, the World Weather Attribution group of scientists have said.
“Climate change kills and we are seeing it,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said this week, hitting out at the “irresponsible discourse of deniers”.
The hostile reception that greeted King Felipe VI, Queen Letizia, Sanchez and Mazon in the ground-zero town of Paiporta last week also generated an explosion of online disinformation.
A photograph of a convoy of police vehicles purporting to show Felipe’s escort was actually a group of Madrid officers arriving in the area.
In another viral image, a firefighter was seen “crying” after emerging from an underground car park in the town of Aldaia where hundreds of people were feared to have drowned.
The photographer told AFP his image captured the firefighter’s exhaustion rather than sadness.
Spain’s national police chief Francisco Pardo condemned the “hoax” in a televised address on Tuesday (Nov 5). The government confirmed on Wednesday that rescuers had found no bodies after all the water had been pumped out.