A small crew of volunteers work to secure a newly installed 10-foot wooden cross memorial along the road near Camp Mystic in Hunt, Thursday, July 10, 2025. (Sam Owens/San Antonio Express-News)

When the Guadalupe River flooded from torrential rains on the Fourth of July, it unleashed a wave of lies and misinformation on social media that eroded trust among many Texans trying to understand the disaster.

For the founder of a geoengineering startup called Rainmaker, the impacts of the misinformation were acute. In the days following the floods, Augustus Doricko told reporters he received upwards of 100 death threats from people who mistakenly claimed he had used a technology called "cloud seeding" to cause the deluge.

"I can handle death threats, needless and unfounded though they are," Doricko said on social media July 10. "Threatening to doxx or harm my family is atrocious."

Doricko and his startup had attracted the scrutiny of online sleuths who harbored a conspiracy that often reemerges in the wake of storms: The idea that governments and companies are secretly manipulating the weather to deadly effect.

Others on social media claimed the flooding could not have been as bad or deadly as authorities said it was. Some shared lies about rescue efforts, or created videos of other floods that were misidentified as raging Hill Country floodwaters.

Family members of a child who is still missing after the Kerr County flood had to combat false claims on social media that the girl had been found, safe and alive.

The misinformation-focused nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, which recently published a research report on extreme weather that included the July Fourth floods, said these narratives repeat whenever disaster strikes.

"The false and misleading claims that grow up around these events can take different forms, but there are some things that are quite similar every time," said Callum Hood, head of research with the global outfit.

These similarities include persistent themes of government weather manipulation and media fabrication, and they build up every time an extreme weather event occurs.

Two employees from HTR RV Park look over the area where dozens of trailers and tiny homes were swept away by rising floodwaters on the Guadalupe River. (Michel Fortier/Staff Photographer)

Long-term impacts of false weather claims

University of Texas at Austin professor and information researcher Josephine Lukito did her own tracking in the wake of the July Fourth floods. Her effort found false and misleading claims ballooned across Telegram, Truth Social, X, and Facebook groups.

She was ready for the surge, she said, because any time natural disasters strike, there are "people intentionally or unintentionally making things up to make sense of them."

While researchers distinguish between misinformation and willful fabrications, known as disinformation, the two can be hard to distinguish without knowing a poster's intent. Over time, that line can get even more blurry.

"I suspect, in the future, people will use the Texas flooding as an example of governmental weather manipulation, or natural disasters that people claim happened that didn't actually happen," Lukito said.

After Doricko was accused of using cloud seeding technology to trigger the heavy burst of rain, the leader of the militia group Veterans on Patrol took to Telegram to call the floods "child murders" and demand retribution. The group, considered an antigovernment militia by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has vowed to destroy forecasting radar sites it falsely claims are "weather weapons."

On July 6, a man vandalized the radar used by News 9 in Oklahoma City, knocking it offline. The channel reported that Veterans on Patrol had claimed responsibility.

Experts said false facts shared during the deadly floods were most dangerous when combined to fit larger narratives like those held by the antigovernment group. Over time, these pieces form the larger puzzle of people's worldviews, according to Northwestern University communications scholar Nathan Walter.

Thomas Rux sits in front of his trailer that was swept away and smashed into a nearby tree. (Jessica Phelps/San Antonio Express-News)

Some lies hit closer to home

Extreme weather falsehoods can also be painful for people suffering the consequences of the deadly events.

Eight-year-old Cile Steward, the only Mystic camper still missing a month after the floods, became an unexpected household name as she continued to draw prayers from as far away as Iceland. People around the world scoured social media for updates, posting their condolences and discoveries in countless Facebook groups.

Walter, the Northwestern scholar, was not surprised. His own research on parasocial relationships has shown that stories of real people can make an abstract catastrophe seem concrete. Once an audience feels personally connected to an individual, he said, "we worry about them as if we know these people in our real life."

Though Steward's family continued to update the public, saying they were mourning while hoping the missing girl would be found, cycles of false information claiming she was located continued to spread online. In one false post, she was rescued from a styrofoam cooler. In another, she was wedged in the hollow of a tree.

Quashing these rumors has left an online trail that looks like digital whack-a-mole.

"Please understand all updates on Cile's recovery will come directly from our family," her aunt, Gina Williams Dowdy, posted again this week.

Still, friends and strangers shared heated exchanges across public Facebook groups as users continued to circulate fabrications about her alleged discovery before being admonished or flagged by others.

Steward was not the only target for specific false stories after the floods. Others circulated readily, including an early fabrication about two young girls rescued from a tree, and a series of baseless-but-viral stories about large donations from celebrities.

What drives false narratives

Sander van der Linden, a University of Cambridge psychologist and top misinformation scholar, said the origins of some falsehoods are as simple as influencers responding to what they think gets engagement on social media.

"People love a hero story," van der Linden said. So some people who monetize their social media presence think, "That's going to get lots of clicks, lots of likes, that's going to get me paid."

Results of the extreme weather research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate pinned part of the blame on social media channels themselves.

"What we uncovered is disturbing evidence of tech companies elevating conspiracy superspreaders, profiting from lies about rescue efforts, and enabling falsehoods that could impede emergency response and place lives at risk," the center's report said.

Sweeping conspiracies might also take off for more complex reasons: Mass casualty events are complicated, and their causes can feel implausible.

"I think the goal is to manage anxiety about randomness, about unpredictability, about uncertainty," van der Linden said. Conspiracy purveyors often like feeling that they are in the know, and might think their voices have been marginalized, he said. But pointing a finger at the government for manipulating weather can also make a deadly flood less scary.

In reality, the destructiveness of the July Fourth flood had countless factors. A hard-to-predict, heavy downpour hit the "Flash Flood Alley" in the early morning, while most victims were still asleep. An organized cluster of thunderstorms, including remnants of Tropical Storm Barry, collided with multiple ongoing storms in the region to intensify rainfall.

Visitors had traveled to the banks of the Guadalupe River for the holiday. Despite accurate, middle-of-the-night forecasts, insufficient warning systems left many in harm's way. The dry, packed ground from a drought exacerbated the intense flood. Many buildings and campsites in the area fell within the floodplain.

Officials supercharged the spread of falsehoods

Meteorologists said "cloud seeding," a real weather modification technique that was used over 100 miles away by Doricko's Rainmaker days before the flood, could not have had an effect. The technique acts in the very short term to trigger ice crystal formation in clouds, which can cause small amounts of rain to fall earlier than it would have. Both of the clouds targeted by Rainmaker were gone long before July Fourth.

And yet, in the days after the flood, prominent public officials with national profiles like Congressional Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene and former Trump advisor Michael Flynn helped viral theories take off.

"This is not normal," Greene said in a July 5 post on X, after tweeting about her plan to "end the dangerous and deadly practice of weather modification."

Samantha Gore, a Texas native who spent her childhood summers on the Guadalupe River but watched the flood news from out-of-state, said she saw the misinformation surge in real-time. She had no family in the flood's path, but lost her former Heart O' the Hills camp director Jane Ragsdale to the disaster.

Gore said she was surprised at how many of the people she was connected to "seem to be confused about what's being done to control weather."

"It's pretty easy to find websites discussing where these ideas came from and why they're not valid," she said.

Texas' Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who has been accused of spreading conspiracy theories himself during past incidents, put out a press statement on July 9 denying the weather-doctoring theories and urging those who cared to stay focused.

"Let's put an end to the conspiracy theories and stop blaming others," he said. "Our priority should be the recovery efforts in the Texas Hill Country."

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