Hurricane Milton is the dystopian peak of engagement bait

It wouldn’t be the first time for her, but on Wednesday this week (October 9), Caroline Calloway was in the eye of a storm. The writer and content creator was sheltering from Hurricane Milton in her condo in Sarasota, Florida, despite mandatory evacuation orders. “If I actually die in this storm, my books are going to go WAY UP in price. Order now,” she posted, with a buy link reading ‘my legacy’. Her decision to stick it out despite frightening predictions about Milton created mixed emotions. The New York Post called her ‘the world’s worst influencer’. Some accused her of lying, others called her stupid, and others expressed concern.

Calloway has made a name for herself by being an unreliable narrator – she released a book titled Scammer, after all – so it’s hard to know exactly where truth and fiction intersect. But her reasons for staying put in Sarasota seemed legitimate. She had a traumatic experience evacuating Hurricane Ian in 2022, and she felt responsible for her grandma’s elderly friends who live in her building. Her home is made from thick concrete walls and wind-resistant windows, she says, and gridlocked traffic made it hard to evacuate. “I will absolutely be pivoting careers into meteorology, since [my critics] were wrong and I was right,” Calloway tells me over the phone, about the fact that the hurricane was less damaging than anticipated.

But Calloway wasn’t the only person who generated content amid the natural disaster. TikTok creator Daniel Marchitto live-streamed himself getting hit in the head by objects while commenters repeatedly posted the word “COCK” in the chat. Another creator, named Matthew Heller, filmed himself kayaking atop four feet of water in his Florida home after Hurricane Helene. “[Water’s] still coming in through the garage, I’m getting annihilated by mosquitos already but, you know, go live on TikTok… all my light switches are gonna get wet, that’s a bummer,” he told his 750k followers. “Why is your power on?” people desperately posted below.

And social media personalities have been rewarded for providing ‘entertainment’ while riding out these storms. Overnight TikTok celebrity Lieutenant Dan refused to evacuate despite living on a small 20ft boat. He has since been offered a new $50,000 to $100,000 boat by online streamer and Trump fan Adin Ross, plus a Kick deal to “livestream his voyages”. Calloway has generated huge publicity for the book. She posted her proof of life, post-Milton, by referencing a meme: “I lived bitch.”

Thanks to payment structures on TikTok and X, engagement bait is in full swing, as users scrabble to be compensated for views and fans send money as gifts. “I do not think it’s an accident that a lot of the people refusing to evacuate are professional content creators,” Rebecca Jennings, a correspondent at Vox, wrote on X. “They know they’ll never have this many eyeballs on them ever again.”

Misinformation researcher Abbie Richards called for TikTok to disable these features as the storm descended. “I’m watching people in Florida putting themselves in serious danger on live, very much incentivised by financial gifts from strangers. Someone could die,” she wrote. Richards added that the disaster was creating “main characters”: users whose large view counts meant that others kept checking back in on them, to see if they were OK.

In the run-up to Milton, social platforms saw an onslaught of fear and misinformation. Accounts called things like @disastervibes7 spliced together apocalyptic storm clips with the sounds of screaming, suggesting it was real footage from Milton. Conspiracy theories took hold quickly online about the government manipulating or ‘geo-engineering’ the weather, creating a digital storm to go alongside the real one. “I’m pretty sure the worst part was the digital hurricane of two million messages telling me to write my social security number on my arm because my lifeless corpse was about to be found by first responders,” Calloway tells Dazed. She’s referring to how some TikTok users who could not evacuate were Sharpie-ing their details onto their skin in the event they were killed.

Calloway didn’t seem to share that sense of fear, although she describes being in the eye of Milton as “eerie”. “I’d never been in the eye of such a large hurricane before, and it was unnerving to suddenly have no wind, not a single sound. All the birds are gone, the bugs are silent. Suddenly you can look up and see the stars. That was the scariest part.” She says that the news organisations criticising her are “unhinged and insane”, and that “a lot of them have never even been to Florida.”

On the night of the storm, Calloway says had a potluck party with her elderly neighbours. She cooked dumplings and they had some wine, “just to take the edge off”. “We joked around and shot the shit to help the time pass... I’ve never been in a better group chat than the past 24 hours with all the octogenarians in my Floridian condo building.”

I moved to Florida to retire from the plot! It’s not my fault that the plot did not retire from me – Caroline Calloway

Calloway denies claims that she used the storm to drum up publicity. Regardless of whether or not this is true, the influencer’s decision ultimately paid off, generating more publicity, and therefore pre-orders, for her upcoming book. “I moved to Florida to retire from the plot! It’s not my fault that the plot did not retire from me,” she says. Calloway adds that she decided to speak to the press as she wanted people “to be able to read about my reasoning from my own words, so that they don’t think that this is a flippant situation, or that I’m treating a serious situation flippantly. I wanted to be able to keep my social media platforms for doing what I do best – entertainment and prose and chaos and art.” 

Calloway has admitted to having a dark sense of humour (and has been open about suffering with depression), and some people might find that entertainment helps them get through scary times. Yet thanks to climate change, natural disasters like Milton are only going to become more frequent. Watching a weather event with uncertain outcomes play out on the internet felt incredibly dystopian and, while news channels in the past would show the aftermath of disasters, we’re now seeing them unfold from the eyes of the victims. We might be entertained, but at what cost?