The L.A. wildfires show how social media has become just another spin room

It’s hard to remember now, as you scroll through a thicket of porn bots, anti-trans activists, and AI slop, but there was a time when Twitter was credibly labeled our “global town square.” Certainly, the social media platform proved a central meeting place for Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter groups.

But more than that, Twitter (in its pre-X days) served as an unmatched source of breaking news. It was home to on-the-ground reporting during elections, in war zones, and at local municipal government meetings. If there was a rush of sirens near my old apartment in Los Feliz, I’d search and find the cause in minutes. The reason for a street closure was a quick query away. I once posted a photo of a strange streak across the night sky and had a follower explain in minutes that a SpaceX launch was behind it.But as I watched the sky fill with smoke in Los Angeles this week, I searched for news on the blazes raging across the city. What I found, instead, was commentary.

As I scrolled, I was fed no tangible information about the containment percentages, or the direction of the winds, or which neighborhoods should prepare for a possible evacuation. Instead, I saw a post by a wealthy entrepreneur who would “pay any amount” for private firefighters to save his home. Then, one about the Los Angeles Fire Department’s women leaders and how that was proof that diversity, equity, and inclusion was to blame for the wildfires. A crop of posts explained that L.A. Mayor Karen Bass may or may not have cut the fire department’s budget while raising the budget of the police department.

Then the AI photos started to arrive. The Hollywood sign ablaze—just like in a movie! It had to be pointed out that the AI that created the images takes loads of water, didn’t it? Perhaps that was why the hydrants were coming up dry.

By now, it was clear we’d left the breaking news space. The carnage of the wildfire was little more than a rhetorical tool: to win existing arguments, to dunk on enemies, and to serve political talking points. This was spin.

The spin room was born in 1984, dreamed up by then-President Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign to guide reporters on deadline toward the idea that Democratic challenger Walter Mondale, who’d seemingly won their final presidential debate, had not connected the “knock-out punch” his run needed to defeat the incumbent. Since then, the spin room has become an American political institution to try to guide conversation down paths favorable to one’s side.

To see the same tactics used for disasters or tragedies is not new. People can’t help but stare at the horrific (“If it bleeds, it leads” is a cliché for a reason), but natural disasters seem even more intoxicating for news consumers. This could happen to any of us. We are all vulnerable. And, aside from climate change—that mammoth existential cause that shall not be named—there’s no clear culprit. So, we go searching for bad guys. And bad policy. And anything we can pin for this unspeakable horror. We spin. Why should we be surprised that social media is now a spin room?In terms of X and now Bluesky, it’s tempting to say “Who cares? A mere fraction of the country uses the platforms.” But the spin room metaphor works, because X and Bluesky reverberate out to cable news, Instagram, TikTok, and opinion sections.

Twitter was long explained as “the assignment editor” for the media. But look through your Instagram Reels and your TikTok feed: It’s also the meme-generation tool for the much more popular social networks. The topics that are amplified matter because they guide the conversation, having an outsize influence—like that of a spin room. We’ve been sold the idea of the “citizen journalist”; instead, we’re living in an era of the citizen pundit.

I hadn’t watched TV news in years, but I put it on last night. I needed to know whether my wife and I should pack up our 2-year-old and our dog and leave our house in Silver Lake to get somewhere safe. On the local news broadcast, a weatherperson detailed the changing speeds of the wind and how that meant that helicopters could do aerial drops over the fire all night. On-the-ground reporters walked a cameraman through Altadena and explained why the fire there had spread so quickly. They pointed out, hopefully but cautiously, that things would likely get better today.

So we monitored the Watch Duty app and we turned our phones on loud and we stayed. Because we’d been informed of the situation. We’d gotten the latest news. There’d be plenty of time when the smoke cleared to find someone to blame.