Currently, there are 135 bushfires in Australia which has killed at lest 26 people, over one billion animals, and an area larger than West Virginia has been scorched. The fires in Australia are being fueled by a severe drought due to its record high temperatures. Dale Dominey-Howes, professor of hazard and disaster risk sciences at University of Sydney, says “The majority of these bushfires have been generated by lightning strikes associated with weather and climate effects”.
However, there have been thousands of posts to #arsonemergency on social media. It was rumored that around 200 people were setting fires and were to blame for the tragedy occurring in Australia. Timothy Graham, Queensland University of technology researcher, says “We studied about 300 Twitter accounts driving the #arsonemergency hashtag to identify inauthentic behavior.” Over the last three months, only twenty four people have been criminally charged for deliberately lighting fires in New South Wales, and only a few of these have led to the start of large fires. The accounts posting this false information are proven to be trolls and bots, trying to shift the narrative from the real cause of this disaster.
The media, and Donald Trump, quickly jumped on the possible cause of the fires being from arsonists. This reminds me of the idea of how oppressed people wore “masks” in their dealing with those who had power over them. By believing that a small number of arsonists are responsible for such a huge tragedy, those who are trying to deny such an important issue like climate change are wearing a mask by taking advantage of any other possible explanation for something that already has a proven cause.
Sources:
https://www.vox.com/2020/1//21058332/australia-fires-arson-lightning-explained
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/10/795218092/australias-wildfires-spark-disinformation-battle-as-they-take-a-tragic-toll
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/10/795169417/enormous-mega-fire-in-australia-engulfs-1-5-million-acres
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Influential people like President Trump are considered smart and credible. However, we know Trump does not fact check and uses his platform to promote false information. He often retweets fake information, making those statistics seem legit. People hear him and thus, hear the ideas of climate change deniers. This emboldens them, makes their ideas more mainstream, and delays the international community’s response to address climate change.
ReplyDeleteIt is very interesting to me how these bots are able to skew the narrative so drastically. It seems to me that it could be part of a deeper plan to deny climate change by those in power or responsible for large amounts of pollution. Trumps involvement in this falsity could be attributed to his lack of fact checking or it could be more of a calculated move. Trump has been a climate change denier for a while and it serves to benefit that claim by promoting these rumors.
ReplyDeleteI am not surprised that Donald Trump is tweeting about a tragedy that is clearly caused by global warming, and blaming it on arsonists, because he has made numerous amount of tweets stating that Global Warming is not "real". For example, "Global warming is based on faulty science and manipulated data which is proven by the emails that were leaked ". This is relatively dangerous having our president of a nation be displaying false information to a large group of followers that may not be well educated. This turns into a global issue where people will start to be convinced that global warming is not a legitimate issue.
ReplyDeleteThere's clear evidence supporting global warming having caused the fires. Droughts and heat waves have made the land vulnerable to bush fires. Day after day the hottest-ever day is increasing, from 107°F in some places to even warmer in others, and still increasing. In Australia, it isn’t even peak bush fire time, which usually comes in fall. Other extreme weather events have been happening across the world completely out of season. 6 people have died, millions of animals have died, and millions of hectares of land have been burned.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50837025