The wildfires that scorched LA in January 2025 were not simply a climate disaster. As the disaster spread, what people needed most were accurate evacuation information and safety guidance, but social media spaces were simultaneously flooded with “falsehoods that looked like facts.” For example, claims that the Hollywood sign was burning, along with fake AI-generated images, spread rapidly, forcing the media to fact-check them. The LA wildfires showed that misinformation during climate disasters is not merely online confusion, but a problem that fuels distrust of and attacks on experts, weakens their public speech, and ultimately threatens citizens’ safety and access to accurate information.
In moments of climate disaster, information is no longer simply a matter of public debate. It is a lifeline that determines whether people evacuate, which route they take, how they perceive risk, and whether their families remain safe. That is why, during the LA wildfires, disaster agencies and public authorities had to carry out not only on-the-ground emergency response but also communication work to manage rumors and misinformation at the same time. At the federal level, guidance was even issued to coordinate government websites and social media communication during the fires, which itself shows that the information environment is treated as part of public safety. Protecting expert speech against misinformation during climate disasters is a minimum state obligation to safeguard citizens’ rights to life and information.
How Misinformation Pushes Experts Out
Complex climate disasters such as the LA wildfires cannot be fully understood without expert explanation. In particular, issues such as fire spread and response, water supply systems, and hydrant failures require an understanding of both technical factors and infrastructural constraints, yet on social media these complex realities are easily reduced to simplistic frames. In fact, the LA Department of Water and Power had to directly correct misinformation surrounding the water system after the fires. Public media fact-checks also showed that false claims related to the LA wildfires and California water policy had spread widely among the public. In disaster situations, expert speech is not merely supplementary explanation, but a crucial foundation that allows citizens to make safe decisions.
The real problem, however, is that this misinformation does not stop at simply spreading falsehoods. It erodes trust in experts and institutions in the public sphere and creates an atmosphere in which “even experts cannot be trusted.” As conspiracy theories spread, experts and public authorities trying to explain the truth are transformed from trusted providers of information into targets of attack and ridicule. The fact that the California state government produced content responding to false claims about water in the format of “experts giving the real facts” also suggests that an environment had formed in which expert speech could no longer be delivered naturally, but instead required rebuttal and defense.
In this environment, the pressure experts feel does not remain merely psychological suffering. Frequent online harassment creates a chilling effect that weakens experts’ willingness to speak publicly. According to a Global Witness survey, 39 percent of climate scientists who responded reported experiencing online abuse or harassment because of their climate-related research and public speech. Among scientists with frequent media exposure, that figure rose to 73 percent. More concerningly, 41 percent of respondents who experienced abuse said they reduced their social media posting on climate issues afterward. In other words, the more misinformation spreads during disasters, the more the space for the expert voices needed to counter it paradoxically shrinks.
The Right to Reliable Information
When experts are pushed out of the public sphere, the greatest victims are not the experts themselves, but ordinary citizens. Of course, citizens are also agents of information who can produce important clues for disaster response through eyewitness accounts and the experiences of local communities. However, when they are forced to assess danger while surrounded by rumors, manipulated images, and simplistic political frames, the quality of decisions directly tied to their safety inevitably declines. Especially in the early stages of a disaster, when there is a major information vacuum, the fastest-spreading content is likely to dominate public perception. Recent academic research analyzing social media discourse also explains that misleading information in disaster-related content can significantly shape public discourse, and as a result, citizens face a growing risk of being guided less by “what is true” than by “what is spreading more widely.” Ultimately, this goes beyond the efficiency of disaster response and becomes a problem in which the very information base citizens need to protect their safety is destabilized.
If experts and citizens cannot trust one another, the information needed in times of disaster becomes a void that is not responsibly shared by anyone. Therefore, responding to misinformation during climate disasters should not be seen merely as a matter of content management, but as a human rights issue. The right to access reliable information in times of disaster is not only the foundation that sustains individual life and safety, but also a precondition for exercising other rights necessary to protect one’s health, mobility, and housing. International human rights discussions are also moving beyond the view that climate information is merely reference material. The OHCHR Special Rapporteur’s report (A/79/176) emphasizes that, in the field of climate change and human rights, access to information is a precondition that makes transparency, inclusion, and effectiveness possible. From this perspective, governments, platforms, and the media have a responsibility not only to fact-check and moderate content during disasters, but also to prioritize the visibility of verified experts and public institutions, and to establish minimum protective measures that can respond quickly to harassment and threats targeting experts.
The lesson shown by the LA wildfires is clear. When misinformation turns experts into targets of distrust and attack and weakens their public speech, the public is ultimately pushed further away from life-saving information at the moment they are most vulnerable. Therefore, responding to climate disaster misinformation must mean protecting an information environment in which expert speech can survive, so that citizens’ safety and access to information can be guaranteed. In the era of climate crisis, resilience ultimately begins with protecting those who speak the truth from being silenced.
