more diverse platform than some other social media platforms like facebook and twitter i spoke to max beaumont he is a prominent to talk creator with millions of followers and he recently wrote an open letter urging trump not to bend to talk precisely for this reason because it has functionality that bursts out of that so-called filter bubble and lets people see a more diverse range of opinions we can have a listen to what he had to say and in my opinion i think it's something where it allows you to see perspectives that you may not be otherwise regularly seeing if you're someone who consistently follows people who are conservative on twitter or someone who consistently polls people who are product on twitter then and then it got put you into this echo chamber of ideology depending on who ever you follow it with with to talk seemingly it's content that generally the public is engaging with and kind of also over time is rising and i think as a result you're seeing things that use might not otherwise be exposed to it and then that is beneficial because it's giving you a wider perspective of pers

even beaumont and galveston and port arthur, the map here shows beaumont max gust could be 67. you know, but that's nothing compared to what they'll deal with in louisiana. >> all right, bill karins, first report this hour. we'll talk to you later as you're tracking hurricane laura just making landfill as bill was telling us officially. let's go now to ali velshi in beaumont, texas, where we know thousands have been evacuated already. you heard what bill was telling us in terms of the impact of laura in texas and kind of dodged a bullet. by looking behind you that is still there. >> oh, yeah, these winds are coming in. we haven't seen the strongest yet. we have a gust coming in right now as you can see this rain blowing sideways. what bill is talking about, though, that we're on the -- we're a little to the left of the storm, to the west which means we're getting northerly winds which means all that storm surge is actually being pushed the other way, being pushed about 30 miles between here and the gulf of mexico, going out and that is a big, big benefit for places like beaumon

in beaumont, gusts at 60 to 80 miles an hour max. those winds will start to weaken and the rain will be ending shortly in those areas as the storm pulls away. the wind gauge stopped working at lake charles. notice the winds are starting to come down. beaumont and port arthur, but the highest gusts are heading up and eventually alexandria and shreveport later on today. we have flash flood warnings from alexandria southward all the way down to the coast. we have 9 million people in flash flood watches for today. of course, you know, even as it's slowly going down to a category 2 and 1 and eventually tropical storm, we still have that swath of winds that will be causing power outages in into southern arkansas later on today. here's the predicted winds. we can see gusts up to 50 many little rock and, yasmin, my general rule of thumb is if you get wind gusts of 50 to 60, you can start getting power outages. that's kind of the general story. i didn't talk a lot about storm surge. we really don't know how bad it was. my indication and gut i