Picture this: It is 11 p.m. on a Tuesday. You are lying in bed, phone in hand, finally winding down from a long day. A friend shares a post that says, “BREAKING: Election officials are already counting ballots in secret, and they plan to change the results.” Your stomach drops. You feel a flash of anger, maybe a little fear. You start to type a caption so your friends will see it too, because this is exactly the kind of thing everyone needs to know. But then you pause. Is it true? That pause is precious, and in the final…

It started with a spark on a windy Hawaiian afternoon—a broken power pole, dry grass, and a fire that would go on to kill more than 100 people and erase a historic community from the map. But in the days after the 2023 Maui wildfires, another kind of fire was spreading, one that moved through phone screens and comment sections faster than any flame. Across Facebook, X, TikTok, and YouTube, thousands of people insisted that the fire wasn’t an accident at all. It was a “direct energy weapon,” they said, a laser aimed from somewhere in the sky, part of…