Fake news spreads over Australian wildfires as inaccurate report of 183 arson arrests is shared worldwide
Australia’s bushfire crisis has led to what appears to be a deliberate misinformation campaign started by climate-change deniers claiming arson is the primary cause of the ongoing fires, despite months of drought and record high temperatures.
Social media accounts, including Donald Trump Jr's Twitter account, circulated the false claim that 183 people had been arrested for arson during the Australian fire crisis – one published in an Australian newspaper.
Seemingly adding weight to the claim, New South Wales police recently said they have taken action against 183 people for “bushfire-related offences” since 8 November last year.
However, only 24 of those people have been charged with allegedly lighting fires deliberately.
Forty-seven have been charged for discarding a lit cigarette or match on land and 53 for failing to comply with a total fire ban.
Climate change has been a divisive topic, with leading politicians dismissing it as a factor in this season's record blazes.
In November, the Australian Deputy Prime Minister dismissed those who linked the fires to climate change as “disgusting” and “raving inner-city lunatics”.
Other conservative MPs have argued that fuel load is the key issue, and some pundits suggested environmentalists had influenced hazard-reduction policy, a claim fire services and state governments reject.
Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, who initially refused to commit additional funding to fighting the crisis, has ruled out changing the government’s climate change policy.
Another element of the circulated “arson emergency” story is the claim that 43 people have been charged in Victoria with arson.
However, this refers to the number of people charged with deliberately lighting fires in the entire year of 2019, including much of the previous summer.
More recently, Victorian Police have charged one 36-year-old man with “recklessly causing a bushfire and drug-related offences”.
A Victoria Police spokesperson told The Guardian that “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.”
The claim 101 people in Queensland have been arrested for arson this summer has also been circulated.
However, Queensland police said the figure includes a broader range of fire offences, including breaching of total fire bans, and was not a total of arrests, but a total of “police enforcement actions”.
Queensland police told local media that of the total reported bushfires in the state between 10 September and 8 January, around 10 per cent are believed to have been deliberately lit.
Helping to circulate the false claims, the hashtag “ArsonEmergency” was promoted by a “much higher” proportion of bot-like or troll-like social media accounts than those with other fire-related hashtags such as #BushfireAustralia or #AustraliaFire, according to analysis by Dr Timothy Graham from the Queensland University of Technology.
Dr Graham examined the ArsonEmergency hashtag because it was being used by some of the more suspicious-looking individual Twitter accounts he'd been monitoring.
He told IT news outlet ZDNet on Tuesday that these accounts “were really focused in particular on climate denial, and The Greens being responsible for the bushfires, and arson attacks being responsible for the bushfires as well”.
Lightning strikes have been a major cause of bushfires this season, as has been the case historically, particularly in Victoria and South Australia.
Record high temperatures and months of drought have contributed greatly to the speed and scale of the blazes.
