On 17 February 2020, Věra Jourová, Vice-President of the European Commission in charge of Values and Transparency, received Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. (Xavier Lejeune/European Union)
Around 2 p.m. Sunday afternoon, Lauri Hutchinson’s daughter ran inside yelling, “Fire.”
A column of gray smoke was rapidly ballooning from the remote Northern California town of Clearlake, directly across the lake from them. A retired firefighter married to a fire chief, Hutchinson grabbed her phone as her husband flipped on his fire radio.
Dispatchers were calling for evacuations and for backup from neighboring counties. Minutes later, Hutchinson, who now works as a fire safety coordinator, posted what she knew about the Boyles Fire to her Lake County Fire Safe Council’s Facebook page, and kept threading updates.
Then she got a confusing message:
“Why did you delete that post?” A retired sheriff’s deputy asked. She hadn’t. But her post was gone, along with all of her real-time updates about evacuations and where the fast-moving Boyles Fire, which sparked near an apartment complex and quickly engulfed homes and cars, was heading.
In its place was a private note from Facebook, saying her post had been marked as spam. “It looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way,” it read, according to a screenshot of the post.
During a scorching, relentless wildfire season, Facebook has been flagging and removing dozens of posts containing links and screenshots from Watch Duty, a widely relied-upon wildfire alert app, as well as from federal and state agencies, according to interviews and Facebook conversations with nearly 20 residents, Facebook users and moderators. And it’s not happening just to people in Hutchinson’s rural and extremely fire-prone community 135 miles north of San Francisco but to volunteer responders, fire and sheriff departments, news stations and disaster nonprofit workers across California and in other states, according to screenshots.
The Washington Post has collected more than 40 examples of Facebook removing emergency-related posts. It’s occurred during at least 20 small and major fires since June, including the Park Fire, as well as Hurricane Debby in August.
While Facebook has misflagged posts as spam during emergencies before, disaster groups and wildfire trackers say that the issue has reached critical mass. In June, they say, something on the social media platform changed, and their content has been disappearing at an alarming rate right when people need it most.
In nearly every instance, the platform tells users that they violated the company’s “Community Standards on Spam” due to trying to get likes, follows, shares or views in a “misleading way.” It happens primarily with links, even to official sites from Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service, sheriff’s departments and AlertCalifornia, which monitors fires and disasters in real-time.
Erin McPike, a Facebook spokesperson, said that the company is “investigating this issue and working quickly to address it.”
The removal issue could not have come at a worse time. Powerful wildfires and record-breaking heat waves have been scorching California and much of the Western United States for months. Currently, in Southern California, firefighters are battling the out-of-control Line Fire, which has forced 9,200 households to evacuate. Concurrently, crews in Orange County are trying to get a handle on the Airport Fire, which exploded Monday afternoon. As of Monday, the Boyles Fire had burned about 30 structures and 40 cars in Clearlake.
Six people told The Post that they tried to share a link on Facebook to Cal Fire’s latest update Monday but couldn’t. Hutchinson said that she’s had at least 12 posts marked so far this year. Chase Wink, who runs another fire page in Lake County, has had about 30 posts removed since Aug. 12, according to a screenshot. Two people have had their accounts suspended for racking up too many of these warnings.
In June, when a fire flared up near Leadville, Colo., the Forest Service created a page for all of its updates. Facebook not only “repeatedly” deleted the daily posts but suspended the site. For about a week, firefighters kept trying to hack the algorithm by testing workarounds.
The most concerning part, users say, is that Facebook does not notify them when their posts disappear from public view.
“It’s not just frustrating, it’s life-threatening,” said Angela Oakley, a manager with the American Red Cross, who had multiple posts marked as spam during Hurricane Debby. “I’ve noticed this happening with more and more frequency, especially around disasters.
It’s unfortunate, as many people rely on social media and networking connections to stay safe during emergencies.”
Afraid of, as the Facebook warning says, “repeatedly breaking the rules” and losing her own page, Oakley says she’s “stopped sharing valuable information” during emergencies. She and about 10 others said they have repeatedly contested Facebook’s determinations but said they never heard back.
For many communities, such as Lake County - whose Public Safety Scanner Lake County CA group has 33,300 members - these wildfire, scanner and emergency-alert Facebook groups have become critical hubs, and are often the first places residents go when they smell smoke or hear a siren. They are familiar, accessible and hyper-localized, and most importantly, residents can get a lot of vital information in one place. In addition to evacuation orders, people post about shelters, where to get a hot meal, resources for pets and how to find missing loved ones.
“Literally it is one of the only tools that I know some people use,” said Hutchinson, who does outreach and fire education in these more off-the-grid towns.
With a population of about 16,600, Clearlake is Lake County’s biggest city. Cell service is often spotty when winding through the hills and grasslands. Its fire and sheriff departments are already stretched thin, Hutchinson said, so they’re not always able to post information in real time, making the county’s Facebook groups and pages even more vital, particularly to those who are older and not as tech-savvy.
And while these spaces should not take the place of official channels, the reality is, they often do - especially as wildfires and weather events have become more frequent and intense, said Oakley and other disaster experts.
Some of the people who moderate these groups treat the work like a full-time job. They listen to police and fire scanners, having learned the lingo for fire behavior, aircraft and operations; cull information from the spate of organizations who report on and respond to a disaster; and then synthesize it.
Danilla Sands is one of them. A director for a nonprofit disaster resource center, Sands spends the rest of her time volunteering as a fire reporter for Watch Duty and running Mendocino Action News, a fire and emergencies group with 37,000 members that started after the deadly 2017 North Bay Fires.
During a rapidly evolving fire, Sands said that a post can get up to 200,000 views. Even though she tells members to diversify where they get information, the group is “still the number-one place people go,” she said. And when people are stressed or in shock, they want what the group knows.
So when a fire sparked beneath an overpass in Ukiah, 40 minutes away from Clearlake, on the hot, windy afternoon of Sept. 3, Sands got ready to post.
The Masonite Fire became chaotic quickly. Flames were running along both sides of the freeway, Sands said, and police started closing roads and were issuing sweeping evacuation warnings and orders. She published her initial rundown and kept scanning.
About 30 minutes later, her Facebook inbox was pinging with messages from panicked residents asking which neighborhoods might be in danger. They were also reporting that the county’s Nixle alerts, which were going to a new app, weren’t working well.
She checked the group, and her post was gone. She made another, which stuck, she said, but still, “35 minutes had passed. And a lot can happen in 35 minutes.”
Not even 20 minutes after the Boyles Fire popped off in Clearlake, for example, firefighters were rapidly evacuating hundreds of people, including an entire Walmart, and requesting 15 additional engines, two extra air tankers and a helicopter. By the evening, about 4,000 residents were displaced.
In chaos and tragedy, sharing information helps people feel like they are doing something, Hutchinson said. She knows this from her own experience.
“I’m used to jumping in and fighting fires. This is my way to respond, this is how I help and serve people,” she said. “And all of a sudden it’s wiped away.”
