TikTok users are asking Amazon’s Alexa unanswerable questions about the outcome of rapidly strengthening Hurricane Milton, which is forecast to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday. Unfortunately, Alexa is providing users with inaccurate answers, sparking panic and conspiracy theories that have already garnered over a million views on TikTok.
Users are asking variations of the same question: “Alexa, what kind of hurricane was Hurricane Milton?”
“From fandom.com: Hurricane Milton was an extremely powerful Category 5 hurricane that caused widespread damage across its path in October 2024,” responded Alexa in multiple videos. (Although Media Matters couldn’t replicate the response, Alexa did tell us the death toll and monetary damages of a hurricane that has not yet made landfall when we asked if there were any fatalities from Hurricane Milton).
Alexa’s response cites fandom.com, a fan-generated entertainment and gaming platform. Within fandom is the Hypothetical Hurricanes Wiki, a “wiki-based comprehensive database of hypothetical tropical cyclone articles that anyone can edit.”
One user ends the video by shaking his head and saying, “They’ve already predicted the outcome, I wonder why?” That video has over 738,300 views.
The top comment on the video, which has been liked by the video’s creator, is a user claiming that the United States government “is using Geo-Engineering/Weather Modification to kill its own people.” The comment has 3,571 likes.
Another video with over 676,800 views contains overlaid text reading “what kind of sorcery is this how do they know the impact…it hasn’t even happened yet.”
The emerging trend is creating a conspiracy theory frenzy among TikTok users, as TikTok is already struggling to contain dangerous conspiracy theories claiming that Hurricane Helene was engineered in order to devastate North Carolina and create access to the land for lithium mining. Now, with the arrival of Milton, the platform is likely to see an influx of even more misinformation.