Over 100 people have now been confirmed dead following flash floods in central Texas over the weekend, including 27 young campers and staff at a local girls' summer camp.

Unfortunately, despite meteorological professionals explaining in news outlets all over the world how and why such devastating flooding occurs, parts of social media have become breeding grounds for disinformation.

One popular conspiracy theory which has been given credence by current and former US political figures—including Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and former National Security Advisor General Mike Flynn—concerns "cloud seeding" — the practice of chemically inducing rainfall from clouds in areas affected by drought.

DW Fact Check takes a look.

Claim: Cloud seeding over parts of Texas two days before the floods caused or contributed to the disaster

DW Fact Check: False

As of Tuesday, over 2.6 million people had viewed a post on X by a well-known conspiracy theorist account which suggested a link between the deadly floods and cloud seeding operations conducted two days earlier by Rainmaker, a weather modification start-up funded partly by US software billionaire Peter Thiel.

In another post, viewed over 2.8 million times, the same account claimed that the state of Texas is "running seven massive cloud seeding programs" in an attempt to "enhance rainfall across millions of acres" and questioning: "Did they push the clouds too far and trigger this flood?"

Accompanying the post was a video originally published on TikTok on May 2 in which the user questioned whether "blue rain" at a camping site in Texas was linked to "chemtrails" or, in the video........

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