Several other videos of Alexas repeating the phrase were posted to X.
Hurricane Milton made landfall as a Category 3 storm in the US state of Florida on October 9, 2024, just weeks after Hurricane Helene hit the state. On October 10, at least ten people died as a result of the hurricane.
Reports claiming the clips were evidence that the storm was planned in advance continued a trend of misinformation about natural disasters in the United States.
But the videos show that Alexa is getting information from an unreliable source.
“These answers are clearly incorrect and we are working to resolve this issue,” an Amazon spokesperson told AFP.
Katja Muñoz, a technology researcher at the Center for Geopolitics, Geoeconomics and Technology in Berlin, Germany, told AFP on October 8 that Alexa devices use resources that rank highly based on engagement, “not solely on veracity” (archived here) .
She said Alexa can easily state something as fact “that just isn’t true.”
Hypothetical hurricanes
The text traces back to the Hypothetical Hurricanes Wiki hosted on Fandom.com, an entertainment and gaming platform, where users can create articles about imaginary hurricanes (archived here).
The wiki had a ‘Hurricane Milton’ page, which described a fictional hurricane that ripped through the US state of Florida and the Caribbean in mid-October 2024. The summary of the article matches the answer Alexa gave to users.
Other information in the article, including the date of landfall and the path of the storm, does not match details about the real Hurricane Milton.
The page was removed from the wiki on October 7, 2024, according to a screenshot of the page’s removal log taken that day. A note next to the edit details reads: “Removal due to misinformation concerns.”
In a post visible on a user’s public message wall, Fandom.com Director of Community Safety Tim Quievryn says he removed the page to prevent people from mistaking it for accurate information about the real storm (here archived).
“As you know, the Hurricane Milton page has attracted a lot of attention from people who Google the term and don’t understand that this wiki is fictional,” Quievryn said.
“I am doing this unilaterally to protect the public interest in receiving accurate and realistic information about this storm,” he said.
More AFP reporting on hurricane disinformation can be found here.
