Australia bushfires spark 'unprecedented' climate disinformation, researchers say
Conservative-leaning newspapers, websites and politicians across the globe have promoted the theory arson is largely to blame. SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA -- Australia's bushfire emergency has sparked an online disinformation campaign "unprecedented" in the country's history, researchers told AFP Friday, with bots deployed to shift blame for the blazes away from climate change.
Those accounts were created very recently, often without profile pictures. Twitter handles were sequences of numbers or characters, sometimes a meaningless combination of both. "The campaign is nothing on the scale of what we have been seeing in other countries, such as the 2016 U.S. election, but this amount of disinformation in Australia is unprecedented."
The claim appears to have sprung from a New South Wales police announcement of legal action against 183 people for bushfire-related offences. "There is currently no intelligence to indicate that the fires in East Gippsland and the North East have been caused by arson or any other suspicious behaviour," a Victoria Police spokesperson told AFP.
Many of these factors have been linked to climate change or made more pronounced because of carbon emissions that have raised global temperatures.
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