Australia Burned Under a Haze of Misinformation Earlier This Year. The U.S. Is Next.
Ketan Joshi - 13 September 2020
In January, I watched Australia burn from a distance, gripped with anxiety and sadness. Only a few months after I moved to Norway, the most terrifying firestorms the country has ever encountered tore through the land.
The sky grew blood red. The pollution from particulates broke records. Towns were razed, homes and lives were lost. Every single person in Australia was impacted in some way, many in deeply tragic and irreversible ways. The place where I was married was burned to a crisp. It was climate change that shoved the familiar phenomenon of bushfires into shockingly new territory.
In Australian media and politics, there is a strangely powerful immune system that can automatically detect the presence of a threat to the fossil fuel industry. This immune response is quite unique. Someone once tried to do a carbon price; ex-Prime Minister Tony Abbott (now a UK trade advisor) claimed an entire town dependent on the steel industry would be erased. In 2019, the center-left opposition suggested an emissions standard for vehicles; current Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned that’d be the “end of the weekend” because people wouldn’t be allowed to off-road.
Climate-intensified wildfires that changed the lived reality of a large majority of Australians in horrific and unforgettable ways triggered an unprecedented immune response to deny reality and a chance at serious climate change. American conservatives have been mostly silent on the wildfires so far, but the Australian experience suggests there’s a risk of misinformation flaring up to downplay climate change’s role in the carnage and shift blame elsewhere.
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It is clear that California’s recent wildfires face a similar pattern. If it emerges anything like Australia’s misinformation firestorm, it’ll have the following features:
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An attempt to blame a prominent group for intentionally igniting fires
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A confusion between what started the fires and catalyzing factors such as high temperatures and dry fuel loads that allowed them to spread
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TV and print media—particularly News Corp outlets such as Fox News or the Wall Street Journal—participating by presenting far more time for minor, unchanging factors while downplaying climate factors
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Political and media commentators helping that spread through both repetition and alteration
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Social media as a tool for spreading these theories through far-right groups, automated accounts and the viral publication of traditional media stories
At the time of writing, it’s only hours since San Francisco’s skies turned Blade-Runner orange. But there are early signs of conspiracy theories that “antifa” are intentionally lighting fires. A Republican senate candidate seemed to be one of the first, and the claim has now spread virally on Facebook. A couple that travelled to an Oregon town to take photos of fires (tip: never do this in any circumstance), but locals thought they were antifa arsonists, and there were calls to “send people out with guns.” This style of misinformation combined with America’s gun problem could have horrific consequences. In the town of Mollalla, Oregon, unidentified men armed with AR-15 machine guns forced three journalists to leave town, amid rumors of “antifa raids.”
Ultimately, the misinformation immune response in Australia’s political and media circles introduced enough doubt and confusion around the link between climate and wildfires to do real damage. It is worthwhile to point out to friends and family who might be vulnerable to this type of misinformation that it’s all happened before in Australia, and that those viral memes were shown decisively to have been false. Priming people to expect this wildfire of misinformation can help control outbreaks. Given the importance of broad public awareness of the link between the burning of fossil fuels and wildfires, it’s worth preparing for a misinformation firestorm well before it happens.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/australia-burned-under-a-haze-of-misinformation-earlier-1845031119