The same conspiracy-theory-peddling personalities who spammed X with posts claiming that Tuesday’s Baltimore bridge collapse was a deliberate attack have also called mass shootings “false flag” events and denied basic facts about the Covid-19 pandemic. A Florida Republican running for Congress blamed “DEI” for the bridge collapse as racist comments about immigration and Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott circulated among the far right. These comments echo Trump in 2019, who called Baltimore a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” and, in 2015, blamed President Obama for the unrest in the city.

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Here are some of the tweets that got attention in the hours after the collapse: Paul Szypula, a MAGA influencer with more than 100,000 followers on X, tweeted “Synergy Marine Group [the company that owned the ship in question] promotes DEI in their company. Did anti-white business practices cause this disaster?” alongside a screenshot of a page on the company’s website that discussed the existence of a diversity and inclusion policy. That tweet got more than 600,000 views.

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Being online during a tragic event is full of consequential nonsense like this, ideas and conspiracy theories that are inane enough to fall into the fog of Poe’s Law and yet harmful to actual people and painful to see in particular when it’s your community being turned into views. Sure, there are best practices you can follow to try to contribute to a better information ecosystem in these moments. Those practices matter. But for (local news editor) Snowden, the main thing she can do as her newsroom gets to work reporting on the impact of this disaster on the community here is to let time march on.

“In a couple days, this terrible racist mob, or whatever it is, is going to be onto something else,” Snowden said. “ Baltimore ... people are still going to need things. Everybody’s still going to be working. So I’m just kind of waiting it out,” she said “But it does hurt.”