Thank you, Bakerer.
Reposting, as was at the ass-end of the last bread.
Manufactured bullshit about our country being completely aflame.
THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT VIRAL IMAGE OF BUSHFIRES FROM SPACE
The scale of the bushfire disaster and the horrifying images emanating from Australia right now need no exaggeration â and yet, deliberately or not, images and claims have been circulating online that arenât what they appear to be.
There have been numerous pictures, videos and claims spread online during this ongoing crisis that donât stack up. Some appear to have been deliberately intended to spread falsehoods while others accidentally took on a life of their own on social media, with the underlying truth becoming lost along the way.
One of the latest is a widely shared composition image of satellite data purporting to show fire-affected areas for the past four weeks, with the 3D render of the image giving an exaggerated effect. However many have shared it believing it shows the scale of fires from space.
After it went viral, creator Anthony Hearsey, sought to clarify the true nature of the image.
âDidnât realise this would go viral ⌠This is a 3D visualisation of the fires in Australia. NOT A PHOTO. Think of this as a prettier looking graph,â he explained.
âThis is made from data from NASAâs FIRMS (Satellite data regarding fires) between 05/12/19 - 05/01/20.
These are all the areas which have been affected by bushfires.
âScale is a little exaggerated due to the renderâs glow, but generally true to the info from the NASA website. Also note that NOT all the areas are still burning, and this is a compilation.â
Despite the clarification, it continued to be shared Tuesday morning including by celebrity Jason Momoa who posted it to his 14.4 million Instagram followers.
Another pair of images doing the rounds shows continental Australia being overlaid with the United States with an exaggerated number of fires burning. One has even been posted by Americaâs ABC News.
It follows a string of misinformation and misrepresentation online surrounding the bushfires.
An online petition this week which claimed a volunteer fire fighter who delivered an expletive-laden reproach to the Prime Minister could be stood down was completely untrue.
Also this week, UK media outlet The Sun shared a video of firefighter rejoicing in the field as rain falls. The only problem is the video is actually from November.
Earlier, a particularly harrowing photo of a mother and her children hiding in the water to escape 2013 fires in Tasmania was circulated as if it was from the current disaster.
At the more extreme end, some accounts, including online bots, have shared the more ludicrous conspiracy theory that environmentalists are lighting fires to further the agenda of climate action. While The Australian reported on Tuesday there has been 183 arrests made this fire season for arson, there has been no suggestion or evidence that any of them have been politically or ideologically motivated.
According to Dr Timothy Graham from Queenslandâs University of Technology, there is a lot of bot and troll activity surrounding the #ArsonEmergency hashtag.
âBased on my analysis it appears that the bushfires have catapulted Australia into the global disinformation space, and the #ArsonEmergency hashtag is a prime example right now,â he told Yahoo News Australia.
The corrosive affect of false information
While misinformation is not a new problem, it can be a problem that goes global very quickly with the opaque and ubiquitous world of social media.
Aside from muddying the waters during the time of a crisis, the big problem is that it erodes the overall trust in information being disseminated under the catch-all term of media.
Dr Andrea Carson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy at Melbourneâs La Trobe University and has researched the âweaponisationâ of fake news and the changing nature of online misinformation.
She says there is a âdirect correlationâ between declining trust in media and the explosion of social media as a news source.
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