A dangerous misinformation campaign is unfolding as the United States battles its deadly bushfires. For Australians, this is worryingly familiar ground.
Over the past month, hundreds of homes have been destroyed and thousands forced to evacuate as deadly fires swept unchecked across the US west coast.
As the fires raged, another worrying parallel has emerged: the spread of dangerous disinformation campaigns, which are dismissed by scientists, police and emergency personnel, yet perpetuated by politicians and online troll bots.
The rise of misinformation
Emergency responders in the US are fighting unsubstantiated social media content that blames coordinated groups of arsonists for starting the fires.
The FBI last Friday confirmed it is investigating several claims on social media that arsonists from both the far left and far right started the blazes.
"FBI Portland and local law enforcement agencies have been receiving reports that extremists are responsible for setting wildfires in Oregon. With our state and local partners, the FBI has investigated several such reports and found them to be untrue," the FBI said in a statement.
"Conspiracy theories and misinformation take valuable resources away local fire and police agencies working around the clock to bring these fires under control. Please help our entire community by only sharing validated information from official sources."
Those working to battle the blazes have also spoken out against such conspiracy theories.
“I am physically and emotionally exhausted. We’ve been working really hard to protect people’s lives and homes,” firefighter Matt Lowery wrote Thursday night on the Facebook page for the East Pierce Fire & Rescue Union, south of Seattle.
“I also want to address an issue that keeps coming up, even from some of the public that we are talking to while working. It is hot, dry, and fire spreads quickly in those conditions. There is nothing to show its Antifa or Proud Boys setting fires. Wait for information.”
America's current war against misinformation and disinformation bears some similarity to that of the Australian bushfires, where misleading claims about arsonists deliberately lighting the fires ended up going global.
Dr Timothy Graham, a senior lecturer on social media analysis at the Queensland University of Technology, examined hundreds of online accounts that were pushing the #ArsonEmergency hashtag on Twitter during the bushfire crisis.
He told SBS News these bot accounts politicised the conversation around the bushfires and amplified falsehoods made by politicians and media outlets.
"I observed that there was a very rapid politicisation of the bushfire debate in Australia in 2019 to 2020," Dr Graham said.
"When I analysed a really large dataset of tweets, I noticed there were these hotspots of activity getting red-flagged by these bot detection tolls."
Bot detection is the process of sifting through large amounts of content to try and find accounts that are behaving abnormally.
"For the #ArsonEmergency hashtag, it was this one island of discussion in particular that was happening, that had a much higher concentration of bot-like accounts. I dived in a bit more and tried to explore what was really happening."
Dr Graham said one can never be sure whether an account is completely automated, or if it's fully or partially human-controlled.
But their reason for existing is clear: to amplify a particular conspiracy theory or point of view, and push it into the public consciousness.
Dr Graham said bot accounts often use mainstream media coverage as a starting point.
More than 200 homes were lost in Victoria as a result of the severe bushfires which blazed through the state in January. Source: Getty Images
"Looking back at the Australian bushfires, the accounts that were posting appeared to have gotten their ideas from articles that were posted by major news outlets," he said.
"They pick up on what the media and politicians say."
During the bushfires, a number of Australian media outlets ran stories highlighting the number of arsonists that had been arrested, and linking those arrests to the bushfire emergency.
Such claims went viral, amplified by high-profile right-wing personalities in the US such as Donald Trump Jr, Fox News' Sean Hannity and Tomi Lahren.
But the arson figures only told part of the story.
In a subsequent press release, NSW Police said only 24 of those people were charged for "alleged deliberately-lit bushfires", and even less managed to start large fires.
In Victoria, where 43 alleged arsonists had been counted among the 183 arrested, officials revealed that that figure had no relation to the summer bushfires, and was actually for the year ending September 2019.
"Police are aware of a number of posts circulating in relation to the current bushfire situation, however currently there is no intelligence to indicate that the fires in East Gippsland and north-east Victoria have been caused by arson or any other suspicious behaviour," a Victoria Police spokesperson said in a 9 January statement.
The NSW Rural Fire Service likewise said dry lightning, not arson, was the major cause of the fires.
“I can confidently say the majority of the larger fires that we have been dealing with have been a result of fires coming out of remote areas as a result of dry lightning storms,” said NSW Rural Fire Service Inspector Ben Shepherd in January.
Dr Graham stressed that such coverage may not have deliberately set out to convey a particular view. But the troll bots that feed off them help push that misinformation deeper into the public consciousness.
"It's eye-opening to see how powerful a role partisan politics and partisan media play in setting the groundwork for this to happen," Dr Graham said.
A political blame game
After weeks of silence, Donald Trump finally addressed the west coast bushfires at a Nevada campaign event on Sunday.
The President refused to acknowledge climate change as a factor in the deadly crisis, instead blaming "bad forest management".
"They never had anything like this," said Mr Trump, who has a history of downplaying the impacts of climate change. "Please remember the words, very simple, forest management."
Some Republican politicians have gone further. Republican state Senator Jim Nielsen and local councillor James Gallagher claimed the cause of the devastating wildfires was "decades of bad policy enacted by Democrats, not climate change".
Addressing a crowd in Nevada, Donald Trump claimed "bad forest management" were to blame for the bushfires. Source: AP
“The excuse of climate change cannot be used to deflect from the fundamental failure to address the fuels build-up in our forests that are the cause of these devastating fires," they said in a statement.
“These same misguided policy decisions have led to rolling blackouts and an energy grid that is falling apart.”
Similar views were pushed by a string of politicians at the height of the Australian bushfire crisis.
Nationals leader Michael McCormack slammed as "inner-city raving lunatics" the people who were voicing climate change concerns.
"We've had fires in Australia since time began, and what people need now is a little bit of sympathy, understanding and real assistance - they need help, they need shelter," he told ABC Radio National on 11 November.
"They don't need the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital city greenies at this time, when they're trying to save their homes, when in fact they're going out in many cases saving other peoples' homes and leaving their own homes at risk."
Later, in December, Mr McCormack said there was a "lot of hysteria about climate change", although he conceded more needed to be done to tackle the issue.
"Climate change is not the only factor that has caused these fires," he said at the time.
"There has been dry lightning strikes, there has been self-combusting piles of manure, there has been a lot of arsonists out there causing fire."
Liberal MP Craig Kelly ran a series of social media posts decrying climate change activists as a "climate cult", claiming the "silent majority were not fooled".
In an interview on ITV's Good Morning Britain, he dismissed the role climate change played in the fires.
"What causes the fires is the build-up of fuel load and the drought," Mr Kelly said.
"To try to make out — as some politicians have — to hijack this debate, exploit this tragedy and push their ideological barrow, that somehow or another the Australian Government could have done something by reducing its carbon emissions that would have reduced these bushfires is just complete nonsense."
Peter Dutton echoed claims that arsonists were largely responsible for the bushfires.
"Obviously, as we’ve all pointed out, we’re experiencing hotter weather, longer summers, but did the bushfires start in some of these regions because of climate change? No," he told the ABC on 5 February.
"It started because somebody lit a match.
"There are 250 people as I understand it or more that have been charged with arson. That’s not climate change."
In a 4 January interview with the ABC, Eric Abetz referred to "unprecedented" levels of arson.
In a , George Christensen claimed the fires were "certainly man-made, it's just not man-made climate change".
"It’s man-made arson that, to me, almost borders on terrorism. And it’s man-made stupidity by politicians who support laws that stop backburning and decent fire breaks.
"The rot being spewed by the Left and many in the media is wrong and it’s disrespectful to those who’ve lost everything."
Dr Griffith said troll bots often parrot partisan lines from domestic politicians, rather than the other way around, as was the case with Australia's bushfires.
"The intuition is often that it begins with bots and trolls and may involve foreign interference. This is not what the evidence is showing, at least from what I can see," he said.
"When you go back and look at the #ArsonEmergency hashtag, domestic political and media actors are taking a position and setting an agenda... which then has a flow-on effect to social media. What we see is a flow from elite actors to social media into public opinion."
Party members break ranks
The US bushfire crisis has also given rise to leaders breaking ranks with their own parties.
On 25 August, Utah Republican representative John Curtis urged more action on climate change, saying it had been blocked by extremism on the left and denialism on the right.
In a speech to the conservative Sutherland Institute, Mr Curtis acknowledged climate change was a problem and said most of his fellow Republicans do not.
“I believe strongly that if Republicans don’t make it an issue, we will lose the upcoming generation of Republicans,” he said.
“The upcoming generation will not be patient with us. This is a deal-breaker for them. They’ll leave the Republican Party over this one issue.”
Mr Curtis's speech came the week after California Governor Gavin Newsom first reported that the state was battling hundreds of known fires.
Mr Curtis's push bears a resemblance to politicians in Australia who broke ranks with some coalition colleagues and linked the bushfires to climate change.
On 11 December, NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean said more needed to be done to reduce the impact.
"We cannot deny that these fires have been going on for weeks and we need to address the causes of them," he told ABC Radio National.
"We need to be doing our bit to make sure we mitigate or adapt to these more extreme weather events happening and we do our bit to abate carbon and reduce the impact of climate change."
His federal counterpart Sussan Ley likewise told the program: "The dryness of the vegetation, particularly in the north of NSW, and the reduced streamflow is creating unprecedented (conditions).
"That's what climate science has told me and I completely agree with it."
