Both Sides Misplace Blame for the Texas Floods
PLUS: RT Makes a Move on Italy; Iran Claims Video Shows Israeli Spies About to be Executed
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In today’s edition, we debunk dueling viral falsehoods on the Texas floods being pushed by the left and right. We also report on how Russian state propaganda arm RT is getting around a ban in Europe through the use of billboards and “documentaries,” and we unpack a misleading video being shared by pro-Iranian accounts that claims to show Israeli spies being led to their execution.
Today’s newsletter was edited by Sofia Rubinson and Eric Effron.
1. No, Federal Staffing Cuts Not Responsible for Texas Floods
By Sarah Komar and Nicole Dirks
What happened: False claims from both the left and right have spread widely on social media following the catastrophic floods in Texas — with liberal users falsely blaming Trump-era staffing cuts at the National Weather Service (NWS) for hampering the agency’s response, while conservative accounts are promoting conspiracy theories about weather manipulation.
Context: Early morning on July 4, heavy rains in Kerr County, Texas, and nearby counties caused the Guadalupe River to rise more than 20 feet an hour, leading to massive flooding. As of July 8, at least 104 people had died in the flooding.
In the days after the deadly flooding, some Texas officials commented that the NWS had initially forecasted less rain than what ultimately fell.
Forecast fiction: Liberal social media users and pundits baselessly claimed that the NWS’s failure to precisely predict the heavy rainfall was caused by staffing cuts that the Trump administration had made to the agency earlier this year.
Liberal X user “Brooklyn Dad Defiant” (@mmpadellan) stated in a post: “The devastating DOGE cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service left them incapable of accurately predicting the terrible floods that hit Texas. This tragedy was preventable. And I blame ONE person: Trump.” The post received 229,000 views and 5,600 likes in a day.
Actually: While it is true that some positions at NWS forecasting offices in Texas were unfilled at the time of the floods, independent weather experts said that NWS provided the most timely warnings and the most accurate forecasts possible given the available weather data.
Wisconsin meteorologist Chris Vagasky told NBC News (NewsGuard Trust Score: 100/100): “The forecasting was good. The warnings were good. It’s always about getting people to receive the message.” He added that the NWS’s increasingly urgent warnings were in line with what weather models were showing and what he would expect.
UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said in a July 5 Bluesky post, “There have been claims that NOAA/NWS did not foresee catastrophic TX floods — but that’s simply not true. This was undoubtedly an extreme event, but messaging rapidly escalated beginning [approximately] 12 hrs prior.”
Indeed, the NWS issued 22 warnings related to the flooding for Kerr County and the Kerrville, Texas, area, where the most catastrophic flooding occurred, according to a CBS analysis (Trust Score: 90/100). The first NWS flash flood warning sent to residents’ cellphones was issued at 1:14 a.m. Central Time, about four hours before the Guadalupe River started rising rapidly. It warned recipients to avoid flooded roadways but did not call for evacuations. The first NWS warning directing recipients to seek higher ground immediately was issued at 4:03 a.m.
Manipulation myth: Meanwhile, conspiracy-oriented and right-wing social media users claimed that the government created the storms that caused the floods through cloud seeding, a weather modification technique that involves releasing chemical particles into clouds to encourage greater precipitation.
Dane Wigington (@RealGeoEngWatch), a prominent promoter of weather-modification conspiracy theories, stated in an X post: “Catastrophic flooding claims dozens of victims in Texas and the count keeps climbing. Climate engineering and climate chaos are inseparable, this is just the beginning.” The post received 18,200 views and 790 likes in two days.
An X post by @CryptoCurb, responding to a post about the floods, said: “This is what happens when you have multiple Weather Modifying / GeoEngineering contracts that artificially produce rain. There is nothing normal about 20+ feet of water level rise in a matter of minutes. End all weather modification programs in Texas.” The post garnered 12,000 views and 30 likes in one day.
Actually: Weather-modification technologies did not cause the Texas floods, according to multiple experts.
One cloud-seeding operation did take place in the region ahead of the floods, although it was aborted on July 1, 2025 — three days before the floods — when abnormally high levels of moisture were detected. The CEO of the company that carried out the operation, Rainmaker Technology Corp, told Bloomberg News that two clouds were seeded, but that the moisture it produced would have dissipated after a few hours and could not have contributed to the severe weather on July 4.
Colorado State University climate scientist Brad Udall said in a November 2024 article by ABC News (Trust Score: 87.5/100) that while some weather-modification methods “can slightly increase the precipitation out of storms,” it cannot cause the storms themselves.
Former Texas National Weather Service meteorologist Alan Gerard told USA Today (Trust Score: 100/100) that the floods were “a case of everything focusing in ‘exactly the wrong place,’” due to a confluence of weather activity, including tropical moisture left over from Mexico’s Tropical Storm Barry from a few days earlier.
A common trope: When extreme weather events occur, conspiracy theories about humans creating or controlling them often soon follow.
In October 2024, social media users falsely claimed that Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which devastated part of the southeastern U.S., were caused by government weather manipulation. In April 2024, conspiracy theorists falsely blamed severe flooding in Dubai and Oman on cloud seeding efforts.
Correction: On July 10, 2025, NewsGuard corrected an earlier version of this article that inaccurately labeled an X post by @Mollyploofkins as containing the false claim.
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2. ‘They Ban the Truth, We Show It’: Russia’s RT Makes a Comeback in Italy
By Giulia Pozzi and Sara Badilini
What happened: Banned in the European Union for spreading war propaganda, Russian state-operated propaganda outlet RT (Trust Score: 20/100) has found another way to promote its propaganda in Italy. Thanks to a new campaign involving billboard ads and public screenings of pro-Kremlin documentaries, RT-content is now being promoted in major Italian cities, including Bologna, Milan, and Rome.
A closer look: Billboards with slogans translating as “They ban the truth, we show it. Find RT documentary screenings in your city” have appeared across Italy.
The Italian-language RT documentaries are being aired in venues across Italy include “Io Sono Vivo” (“I Am Alive”), a film portraying the Russian ‘liberation’ of Mariupol; “Bambini del Donbass” (“Children of the Donbass”), featuring testimony from residents who “live under the bombs of Kiev”; and “Donbass. Ieri, Oggi, Domani” (“Donbass. Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow”), which details, from Russia’s perspective, the recent history of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions and the “horrors” experienced by the region’s Russian speakers.
Who’s behind it? According to pro-democracy think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), screenings of RT content have been organized by Andrea Lucidi and Vincenzo Lorusso, two pro-Kremlin journalists based in Russian-occupied Donetsk, and have been promoted by Lorusso’s pro-Kremlin Telegram channel Donbass Italia. They also have been pushed by outfits such as ControNarrazione and InfoDefense, which promote pro-Kremlin narratives under the guise of alternative media or peace activism.
Although it is unclear whether RT is actively involved in this campaign, the initiative apparently circumvents a 2022 EU regulation, issued following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, prohibiting the distribution of RT and Sputnik content in EU member states.
It is unknown who is paying for the campaign. Pina Picierno, vice president of the European Union, said she plans to file a complaint with judicial authorities to investigate the source of funding.
In a July 2025 email to NewsGuard, Italian journalist Andrea Lucidi said that neither he nor Vincenzo Lorusso was responsible for organizing the screenings of RT documentaries, but stated that he had taken part in some of them as a guest. He added that "the actual organization of the screenings is handled by autonomous local groups, which freely choose to use the content."
Public backlash: Political and community pressure have led to the cancellation of several scheduled screenings, local media has reported.
Planned screenings of “Voices from Donbass” in Arezzo and Tortona and a planned screening of “Donbass. Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow” in Bologna were called off following protests from local politicians and democracy activists, according to the ISD and Bologna Today.
By the numbers: Posts on X that have promoted or positively discussed these documentaries collectively reached 13.4 million social media accounts between Jan. 1, 2025, and July 4, 2025, according to a social media analytics tool used by NewsGuard.
Update: This article was updated on July 10, 2025, to add comment from Italian journalist Andrea Lucidi.
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3. Pro-Iranian Video Hoax Shows Captured Israeli Spies; Gets Millions of Views
By Charlene Lin
In the wake of Israel's devastating surprise attack on Iran and its nuclear facilities on June 13, pro-Iran and pro-China accounts are circulating a video purporting to show Iran parading captured spies from Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency ahead of their alleged execution.