Update - October 10, 2020:
Aug 26, 2020 - The Public Facebook group "Hurricane Laura Aftermath" was created
Oct 7, 2020 - The same group changed its name to "SWLA Hurricane Aftermath 2020"
The group SWLA Hurricane Aftermath 2020 (formerly Hurricane Laura Aftermath) can be found here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/350081832688269/
Dear Representative or Senator,
My name is Casey Jones and I live in the Houston, TX area. I'm a native of Texas but my family moved to Louisiana when I was young and so I lived there for several years before moving back to Texas. I'm a software developer and have been for many years and I have extensive knowledge about what makes applications work and I'm referring mainly to all of the things that take place behind the scenes that most people never think about because they simply have no reason to.
As a result of my personal efforts to help people in Southwest Louisiana following Hurricane Laura and the destruction left behind in its wake, I noticed a somewhat potentially serious issue with social media, and in particular, with Facebook and the possibility for a bad actor to use it in a harmful way in order to disrupt recovery efforts following major natural disasters such as Hurricane Laura. It is also just as possible for someone to inadvertently and unknowingly hinder or disrupt the recovery efforts in the same manner.
I am about to explain how this is possible but first I am requesting that you bring in some people who are familiar with computer programming, Internet based application development, and social media with advanced knowledge about Facebook so that you may get their advice about what I'm going to explain in this letter.
I feel that it is important for you to note that even with all of my many years of experience and advanced knowledge on these specific topics, the potentially huge negative impact that this issue can have on a recovery effort following a major natural disaster was neither immediately apparent to me, nor was it something that would seem to be a problem for an entire population of disaster victims. However, I do believe that this issue is exactly that and that it is much more serious than the majority of people will realize without some help from some experts in these specific areas of technology helping them along and building a better understanding of the subject matter. This is especially true for anyone who doesn't grasp these things as a seasoned developer or other type of industry expert should or eventually should understand them.
As I said, even subject matter experts might need to think about what's involved for a while before the gravity and the full scope of how bad this can be actually sinks in, but I'm confident that at some point following having focused on all I have to say here, a true expert will eventually realize the magnitude of the potential for causing serious negative consequences for countless people who don't need any additional problems added to the ones they probably already have in the wake of a major natural disaster. I've taken the time to emphasize all of this because it is important for people in positions such as yours not to discount or disregard any of this as a trivial matter because I assure you, this is not a trivial matter and it needs some attention from the people who can actually do something about it. People in positions such as yours can prevent negative consequences from transpiring as a result of not being aware of details surrounding this topic by hearing me out, as I'm about to inform you.
That said, let me explain what I've seen in the wake of Hurricane Laura and when I'm finished I feel like you will have what you need to better understand the potential problems involved, how and why I even noticed any of this, and even some suggestions for how to effectively deal with this issue and prevent it from ever becoming a problem in the first place. Ideally, that is the goal I'd like to reach, and reaching it is the sole reason I'm even writing this letter today.
When Hurricane Laura made landfall in Louisiana near the town of Cameron around 1:00 a.m. CDT, it had official and verified sustained wind speeds of 150 mph making it a very strong category 4 hurricane and putting it right on the verge of being a category 5 hurricane. If the sustained wind speeds had been a mere seven mph faster, it would have been labeled a category 5 storm rather than a category 4. A wind gust of 128 mph was reported at the Lake Charles Regional Airport around the time the storm hit land. It is estimated that Laura maintained hurricane intensity for the next 10 hours as it moved northward into northern Louisiana and decimated much of the region along its path.
Reports of damage in the immediate wake of the storm were very limited and vague for several hours following landfall, and I was busy trying to get an accurate idea of just how bad the damage was as soon as possible. I began working on things immediately after the storm had cleared the Lake Charles area. Lake Charles and the surrounding area is where I know most of the people that I know in Louisiana.
Not long after the storm had passed through Southwest Louisiana, a friend of mine on Facebook sent me an invitation to join a public group called "Hurricane Laura Aftermath"; I accepted it and immediately that group proved to be very useful, and I was a very active member of it as well. It only took about three days following the storm for that group to reach a viral growth rate status and it had already reached 105,000 members by that point in time.
That group was on track to be a real force in the recovery process and it seemed obvious that it would soon be able to fill the void where the national news has typically always been but for some reason were mostly missing. Usually they'd be setup somewhere with boots on the ground covering the aftermath of the disaster, but all things considered, the absence of the national news coverage came as no shock to me personally as it seemed to fall right in line with their absence for other recent events that they would have covered based on historically similar events in the past. With the way the past few years have gone, especially everything that has happened in 2020, I could wake up with my head stapled to the carpet and it would not shock me at this point in time.
Unfortunately, it was about this same point in time, around three days or so after the storm had passed that the administrators and the moderators of that group made the decision to make the group a private group rather than keep it a public group. I'm not sure exactly how long it took from the time they did this until I realized they had, but I do know that it wasn't long, and it was quite obvious when I saw some information posted there that I wanted to share and there wasn't a "share" button on the post as all of the posts I had already shared from that group's members had. I checked the share settings for that particular post to see if the person who posted it had changed their personal share settings and it didn't seem that they had, so I checked some other posts from various members and it was the same, there wasn't a share button anymore, and that could really only mean one thing, which was that the administrator had changed the group to private.
Within about 10 minutes from the time I first noticed the change, I had already created a post and even received several replies. I directed the post to the administrators and asked what they had done and why, and several people replied that the decision was made because too many people were arguing about things like politics, or other issues that weren't necessarily on topic and really had no place in such a group. Knowing what I know about social networking and programming however, the change the administrators made to that group meant that as soon as the change went into effect it instantly killed the viral growth rate of the group and ensured that from that point forward, membership levels would increase at a snail's pace rather than at the viral rate they had achieved within only a few days.
It was a devastating blow to social media efforts for Hurricane Laura victims, and that was immediately apparent to me. I urged the administrators to reconsider and to employ the tools that Facebook has built-in to their administrator controls that are specifically designed to deal with things they had sighted as the reason for switching to a private group. It seemed ludicrous to me to throw away so much potential in addition to a viral rate of growth because people were arguing; such a tradeoff and the willingness to make such a trade signified to me that one of two possible choices had to be true: (a) the administrators were too inexperienced to be in charge of such an important group as theirs was/is/could have been (or) (b) this was being done intentionally for some reason to hurt the social media efforts regarding the recovery process.
For as bad as this seemed from my perspective and with the knowledge I have on the subject matter, it was over the course of the next week or so that I would consider some possibilities that I never had considered before this transpired which would result in the full gravity of what this handful of people had actually done, and it is far worse than simply changing a group's settings from public to private. Such a change would normally be trivial and would go unnoticed by everyone involved, but this particular group has some attributes that most other Facebook groups do not.
For one thing, Hurricane Laura Aftermath was public when it began, and it was made specifically for the aftermath of Hurricane Laura. Next, Hurricane Laura caused major widespread damage leaving many thousands of people displaced, without electricity, without normal lines of communication, without water, without access to prescription medications, and in some cases probably without an ample supply of food, and mostly without readily available first responders because in the wake of such disasters there is really nowhere in the world where there are enough first responders who can get to everyone who suddenly find themselves in a bind that requires such assistance.
On top of all of that, any first responders who respond to calls immediately following a storm such as Laura are going to need a chainsaw and a non-contact voltage tester and someone who is familiar with both in order to safely make it to the people who need help at that point. If nothing else in that situation is a certainty, what is certain is that there will be trees and there will be power lines laying across roads all over the place. They will also need to have a readily available supply of fuel as well, for the vehicles and for the saws.
Most groups on Facebook, and by most I mean probably around 99.99% of the groups on Facebook do not pertain to things that even come close to how critical the subject matter of a group such as Hurricane Laura Aftermath was, but when you factor in the lack of national news coverage on this storm it makes social media many times more important than it typically would be. But wait, this is where it starts getting much worse than what I've already discussed, because the timing of when that group switched to private happened at very critical points in time and as a direct result, whether it was intentional or not or whether anyone immediately notices it or not, is also responsible for the social media reach of every local news channel posting about it to also be greatly reduced.
I'll explain. The group had 105,000 members when the decision to go private was made. That translates into 105,000 of the most active members of Facebook and who are also mostly residents in or near the affected areas suddenly being put into a private bubble without having any idea whatsoever that this is what has just happened. These are the people who are doing most of the posting and most of the sharing of information related to the storm, including most of the sharing of news and storm related information that they're obtaining from local news stations in or near the affected areas.
That wouldn't normally be a bad thing if it weren't for the fact that most of those 105,000 people are sharing that information primarily in that private group, and unfortunately the only people who can see what each of those posts pertains to are people who are already members of that group. They are 105,000 people posting 21,000 posts per day primarily with each other, over and over and over again, and that is in addition to the fact that the viral growth of the membership of that group ceased to exist as soon as the button was pressed changing the privacy level of the group from public to private.
That is 21,000 posts per day that are doing very little for the overall social media effort, and so the group I'm talking about here ends up being much worse for combined efforts than it would be if it didn't exist at all, and with every new member it adds to that group, it takes that person away from an effort elsewhere that might actually help the social media reach. The more active members in that private bubble, the worse it is for social media reach for this topic.
To Be Continued...
There are a number of problems with this entire scenario that I have had to watch play out before my eyes in real time since the storm moved through the affected areas, and to truly grasp the gravity of what this has caused will not even be possible until long after I'm finished writing this letter. As a matter of fact, it will be after the recovery process is completely finished, which could take years.
It will take researchers and social media experts many hours of looking at related data and comparing various data to historically similar data that predates this particular natural disaster just to highlight the fact that there was in fact an anomaly and that it did cause adverse negative consequences to countless storm victims. But the worst part of all of this is the fact that none of this is readily noticeable so nobody will even look into what I'm saying here unless this is drawn to someone's attention and it triggers certain connections.
So where would someone even start looking to see the damage this Facebook group has caused the overall social media efforts to help the recovery process? Local news stations and their social media reach following the storm would be one place. If you compare that data to the same data from past natural disasters I believe you will see a noticeable reduction in each news station's social media reach and effectiveness. You would have to base conclusions on percentages and estimates however, and unfortunately there is no way to be sure of the exact extent of damage that group caused to the people affected by the storm.
I have no doubt whatsoever in my mind that this group has caused a great deal of damage to the overall recovery process though, and that is because they have caused a significant reduction in overall awareness of the situation in the affected areas following the hurricane. This was either the worst case of accidental waste of social media momentum and reach potential that I have ever seen for as long as I've been using social media, or someone has done this to intentionally hinder the recovery process by reducing overall awareness of the extent of damage caused by the storm.
In light of the fact that the national news media outlets have likely had to go out of their way to not cover the storm's aftermath to an extent that even nears a fraction of their coverage of historically similar events that predate this storm, and that it's possible that not covering the damage that Laura caused took them as much effort as giving it better coverage would have, it seems almost as if they have been forbidden by someone to provide that media coverage. It seems like someone with the power to give such an order is intentionally trying to conceal the situation and the extent of damage following this particular disaster.
Considering that the majority of the people who use social media don't have the technical background that I do, or that other programmers do, it would be much simpler to make the social media reach disappear. All you'd have to do to make that happen would be to do exactly what the Facebook group "Hurricane Laura Aftermath" did, and you'd virtually ensure that the storm victims would have the minimal amount of social media reach possible.
It is entirely possible that this was not intentional, but considering what I've seen with the purposeful lack of national news coverage following the storm, it is also just as possible that stopping the social media coverage of the storm was also as equally intentional as stopping the national news coverage has been.
Here's the thing though, if what has transpired with the Facebook group "Hurricane Laura Aftermath" hasn't been by design from the beginning, then you should certainly be aware that using such a tactic and causing such a disruption in the recovery process is probably something that could be employed as an espionage tactic against the U.S. Most people will never notice that anything is causing problems with a tactic such as this one would. Even people who use social media on a professional level on a daily basis will most likely never notice an issue unless it is brought to their attention directly and they conduct a thorough investigation involving a great deal of data. And even then, a lot of the required data would not even be available until long after the recovery process is completed which would provide a bad actor ample time to cover their tracks and just disappear.
To most people, a tactic such as that one would be would simply never be noticed. It would provide a serious disruption to the overall recovery process and cause additional problems and it would simply be attributed to the storm rather than the fact that there was someone intentionally causing additional difficulties for victims of the disaster. It would be a perfect way, a virtually undetectable way to disrupt a large region of a country and would most likely go unnoticed by anyone.
It is crazy to think that something as seemingly harmless as a group on Facebook could cause a national security threat like that, but after seeing what I've seen following Hurricane Laura, whether you believe it or not I assure you, it can happen.
It is probably not a simple coincidence that my Facebook account was permanently disabled after attempting to draw attention to all of this. I had that account for well over a decade and probably closer to two, and it was only after I saw all of this transpiring and tried to bring it to peoples' attention that my account simply got shut down by Facebook without any kind of explanation or reason provided by them. Shortly after that took place, they made a revision to their Terms of Service, here's a screenshot of what that change was:
This could be easily prevented by Facebook, all they'd have to do is make it to where anytime a public group is created regarding a major natural disaster, that group doesn't have the option to change its privacy setting from public to private. That would squash it, that would prevent it from being possible. Considering how simple it would be to fix this, in addition to my account being permanently "disappeared" by Facebook all of a sudden, I've even wondered if Facebook might somehow be behind intentionally doing this in order to stop the social media reach in a concealed way.
This could also be prevented by the United States Legislature by forcing Facebook to make this simple change and relieving them of holding such power over the people whom already fill their pockets with gold. It's unfortunate that I had to lose my account in order to make all of these connections and consider all of these possibilities. Que sera, sera I guess. To my friends and family members, I apologize for my abrupt and unexpected disappearance, but now we all know the most likely reason for that happening.
Sources for some of the information in this letter:
https://blogs.nasa.gov/hurricanes/tag/laura-2020/
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