The Dystopia of Watching Hurricane Milton on TikTok

Then there’s Caroline Calloway. The influencer and author, who lives in Sarasota, drew the ire of the internet when she posted on X “where there’s a Callowill, there’s a Calloway,” and said she wouldn’t be leaving her home, even as officials were stressing the importance of evacuating. (“You are going to die,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor warned anyone who stayed put.) In an interview with New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, Calloway said she was staying to check on elderly neighbors, adding that her sense of humor is just “very dark.” On Thursday, she apparently sent a text to Intelligencer’s writer with a picture of herself and her cat with the message “I lived bitch.”

All of this wouldn’t feel so dystopian if the US—and the world—wasn’t hurtling toward a scenario where social media platforms, particularly TikTok, function as a lot of people’s go-to news source. Even as Anderson Cooper braves the storm to give CNN viewers updates on Milton, a new report from Pew Research shows 52 percent of Americans who are on TikTok regularly get their news there. Not from media outlets, but from influencers and content creators.

While these accounts may be relying on reports from traditional outlets when they deliver news, their posts are “probably interspersed with a lot of very nontraditional content—like skits, funny dances, or promotional content,” Aaron Smith, Pew’s managing director of data labs, told Axios. On-the-ground reporting from influencers, then, becomes mixed with entertainment. Watching it, or, admittedly, writing about it, feels like missing the point.

Loose Threads:

Lots of people were following the Waffle House Index during Hurricane Milton: If you don’t know, the Waffle House Index tracks whether or not a local outpost of the chain is open in a given location. If it’s closed, the coming storm is probably bad, because Waffle House prides itself on keeping its restaurants open as often as possible. When the chain closed several locations, people took notice.

The Fat Bear contest has a winner: Grazer beat Chunk to win Alaska’s Fat Bear Contest. It was her second win, and she defeated the bear who killed her cub earlier this year.

Stay safe hiking out there: Thanks to a video from @stanchrissss, lots of people are posting TikToks demonstrating the ways they show people who they are while passing on hiking trails. For @stanchrissss and friends, it’s showing women they’re gay/uninterested. For one woman, it’s saying things like “I shot him twice and he cried.”

The Ohio mystery rug discoverer says she got hacked: A lot has happened to Katie Santry since that whole haunted rug thing we told you about last week. Including, maybe, getting hacked.