TikTok had the best coverage of Hurricane Milton — with one catch

• As Hurricane Milton hit, TikTok was flooded with live streams from people in Florida.
• But while there was plenty of live video, it was hard to watch for breaking news.
• TikTok has also fueled controversy, like with a woman who refused to evacuate her waterfront home.

As Hurricane Milton approached Florida this week, my “For You” TikTok page was filled with videos of people rolling down their windows, scooping up sandbags, and live-streaming their surroundings as the weather grew increasingly ominous. As night fell and blackouts swept the coast, we watched live streams of palm trees sway in the dark rain.

On the one hand, this live video was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to see. And it’s a dream for some tech moguls — as Elon Musk said of X — to host citizen journalists on the ground, streaming unsolicited live video.

But he was also utterly confused. Going through the live feeds, I wasn’t sure if they were filmed in the direct path of the storm or elsewhere in Florida. Were these pre-recorded? Or filmed during another hurricane? Or were they really alive? What exactly was I looking at here? Regardless, I couldn’t look away.

Live reporting from a hurricane has been a news staple since before Dan Rather’s famous broadcasts. (The modern version would be Anderson Cooper getting nailed in the face with flying debris Wednesday night on CNN.) It’s a visceral human experience to be amazed by extreme weather.

TikTok has amplified controversial characters

But there was another modern element to TikTok’s coverage—a weird and ugly theme that TikTok seemed to uniquely encourage: the viral villain.

Like “couch guy,” “West Elm Caleb” or the messy breakup “Womblands,” TikTok is good at creating a deluge of negative focus on characters. It’s a bit different from the classic “feature of the day” idea of ​​old Twitter, as the algorithmic nature of TikTok FYP removes the context.

And indeed, TikTok found controversy for Hurricane Milton. A woman posted a series of videos earlier this week of her large home, saying she won’t leave even if she’s in a mandatory evacuation zone near water. She said: “My husband built this commercial house… it is residential but it was built commercially. It is solid concrete.”

The videos went viral and she became the “villain” of the day. (She turned off comments for her more recent videos showing her making it safely through the hurricane; BI has reached out for comment.)

After seeing the devastation of Hurricane Helene just weeks ago and the devastating flooding in North Carolina, people were primed for outrage at Floridians who ignored evacuation orders.

There was also outrage on other platforms about people who didn’t evacuate, such as controversial memoirist Caroline Calloway, who took her Instagram story by storm. On the streaming platform Kick, a man tried to ride out the storm on an air mattress in exchange for $70,000 offered by streamer Adin Ross, who recently interviewed Donald Trump. The streamer eventually gave up, but Ross gave him $10,000 for the effort.

If you feel like you’ve lost several IQ points reading the last paragraph, you’re not alone.

Max Read wrote about these villainous hurricane streamers in his newsletter:

None of these people are particularly informative or helpful; they are hardly entertaining. All of these videos — which are generally what pops up when you search for “Milton” on TikTok or Twitter — are new remixes of the same kinds of horrendous TV motifs that now dominate every social network: challenges of standing up to a unclear ending; wealth and self-aggrandizement porn; and most importantly, mental illness as a form of entertainment. Only, instead of following them because you’re bored, you follow them because they’re what pops up when you search for information about an ongoing news event on social media.

TikTok had the best live video from the ground in Florida, but not a good way to make sense of it

It’s certainly true that the attention economy rewards attention-seeking trolls and bad behavior and loves a good dog. This, I think, is a problem with the way TikTok has distributed the content. There were many videos showing the experiences of people preparing for and escaping a historic storm – but only the most outrageous ones went viral.

Normally, the “Live” section is a mix of ASMR creators, randoms, and people trying to dig for digital coins. But on Wednesday night, there was actually a lot of live, interesting and compelling news coverage of an important event happening in a certain location. It was a lot different from X, which used to be the best place to get live news.

The problem was that TikTok’s warping effect always leads us to these specific scandalous stories. Instead of some sort of organized live stream of storm coverage, we saw several videos discussing two or three people who decided against all good judgment to stay in their homes.

TikTok isn’t meant for live, breaking news, and I imagine it probably doesn’t want to be. It seems that the platforms have realized that this is a bad business! But at this point, I see how TikTok could — with some algorithm tweaks — be useful for the kind of coverage we’d otherwise get from TV news.