As news spread Thursday morning that the town of Jasper, Alta., had been torched by wildfire overnight, a post appeared on X (formerly Twitter) suggesting the disaster could have been prevented if "TRUDEAU and his team wasn't so focused on sending money to other Countries," and accompanied by a clip of the burned-out town.
The post, by the X user @MelissaLMRogers, racked up nearly 280,000 views and over 880 comments by mid-afternoon. Dozens of users laid blame for the fire on the federal government; some hinted at a longstanding conspiracy that claims the wildfires that have torched western Canada in recent years are part of a plot by Trudeau to control Albertans.
Later in the day, X/Twitter user @Martyupnorth posted to the platform claiming that suggesting that a suite of wildfires that burned down Alberta towns dating back to 2001 were an effort to make Alberta "comply" with a so-called "climate scam."
Within three hours, that post had racked up nearly 50,000 views and more than 400 comments.
Both of the X/Twitter users appear to have close links with Canada's right-wing movement. On her Youtube channel, @MelissaLMRogers – who goes by Melissa Rogers on the platform – highlights several videos from the 2022 Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. For his part, @martyupnorth does not hide his politics, noting he is a "libertarian" in his X/Twitter bio and has been a featured guest on dozens of right-wing Youtube channels in recent years.
The posts highlight a fast-growing problem: as wildfires scorch ever-larger parts of Canada and force thousands to evacuate, they are fueling the spread of right-wing disinformation and climate conspiracy theories.
"We know that events that are associated with climate impacts, especially crises or emergencies, attract a lot of attention and engagement," said Chris Russil, a professor at Carleton University who studies climate disinformation in a June interview with Canada's National Observer. "Anti-climate actors are keen to show up to contest the congealing of climate concern that tends to happen around events like this – particularly wildfire."
That was evident during last year's record-breaking wildfire season, according to a recent report co-authored by Russil. The study analyzed Twitter/X posts about the wildfires throughout 2023 to determine which posts gained the most traction and when.
The researchers found that social media lubricates the spread of false and misleading information in times of crisis. But the effects persist beyond hindering evacuation efforts and emergency response; disinformation about the wildfires also helped fuel opposition to climate policies.
Among the most prominent – and troublesome – themes to emerge in these social media ecosystems is the conspiracy theory that the wildfires were lit by "eco-terrorists, left extremists and governments … to advance a climate agenda," the report notes.
This narrative of "climate authoritarianism" was often amplified by people or accounts that had been anti-lockdown crusaders during the pandemic, Russill said.
"You see a real blurring of pandemic emergency and climate emergency as overstated, fabricated or false, and used as a pretext to get people to sign on for policies that would extend state control," he explained in June. "Given that the pandemic has receded, the influencers and politicians that built their reputations and networks through anti-public-health content are starting to bring climate into those narratives to hold interaction and engagement."
Nor are authoritarian conspiracies the only type of misinformation to be fueled by Canada's wildfires. For months, Canada's largest logging lobby group – the Forest Products Association of Canada – has for months led a massive campaign to convince Canadians logging is a solution to wildfires and climate change.
The so-called "Forestry for the Future'' campaign has spent thousands on Facebook and Instagram ads in recent months. It has also created videos and podcasts, placed large-scale ads in public spaces, paid for op-eds and articles in major news outlets and partnered with TikTok and Instagram influencers, according to a June presentation from FPAC president and CEO Derek Nighbor to the Maritime Lumber Bureau.
One of the group's key messages is that logging can help prevent catastrophic wildfires. But while critics say logging can be part of the solution to reduce the intensity and danger of wildfires, they emphasize that industry cannot be leading the charge, according to an April article by Stephen Labbé.
Elements of this narrative have emerged in the social media surrounding the Jasper fires — for instance, a post by the Cedar Trees Environment Association, a U.S.-based foundation that funds health and environmental initiatives, which claims that "the radical left is going to blame climate change while ignoring forest mismanagement in our National Park."
Other X/Twitter users, like fire ecologist Evan Frost, have fought back, pointing out that the Jasper fire will generate "lots of accusations that lack of forest [management and] beetle-killed trees are the cause of this fire behavior. Not so. These forests burn infrequently but when they do it's under drought/severe fire weather, just as is happening now," he wrote.
Despite rainfall Wednesday night, Jasper officials say Jasper is not yet safe from the flames. Still, even when they die down the disaster's online firestorm appears poised to continue.
Comments
To Alberta and Canada: this fire is the effect of the continued doubling down on production of fossil fuels and the BURNING of fossil gas for transportation, home heating etc.
One thing I'd frame differently.
"The researchers found that social media lubricates the spread of false and misleading information in times of crisis."
Social Media *facilitates* the spread of bollocks, at all times.
What lubricates it is the lack of regulatory guardrails, I'd suggest.
It's long past time we take took action to bring it to heel.
Almost everything on social claiming something is frankly false, period.
Social media is a disease and too many brain dead people believe everything posted must be true. Social media users are incapable of fact checking anything and as a result, if the post fits their narrative, they repost the disinformation & conspiracy theories further.
To not infringe on anyone's right to express their opinion, social media companies should be forced to at least flag a post as conspiracy or disinformation or misinformation or as outright not true. Same as they did for Trump at one point on Twitter (now X).
The convoy crowd are by far the most naive group I have ever come across. Everything these folks believe seems to be based on conspiracy theories and misinformation. They believe they are patriots, but I am sorry, they are totally the opposite when it comes to that fact. The fact a patriot vigorously supports their country, the convoy crowd only have a hate on everything this country stands for. It's a total embarrassment that these clowns wave a Canadian flag and at the same time dislike what the majority of Canadians stand for and believe.
"To not infringe on anyone's right to express their opinion, social media companies should be forced to at least flag a post as conspiracy or disinformation or misinformation or as outright not true. Same as they did for Trump at one point on Twitter (now X)."
Somehow, today's received wisdom is that a right to speak one's mind equates to the right of social media to exist. Someone please tell me where that is written.
To be clear: social media does not equal freedom of speech.
Social media is a product, like toilet paper (except the vendors of TP aren't, to my knowledge, mining the information available from it's use).
Killing social media (outright or as it exists) is NOT killing free speech. Anyone is free to create their own outlet to publish whatever drivel they are moved to, within the guardrails imposed by law.
Please stop equating Zuckerberg's (et al) realization of a wet dream with a basic tenet of a liberal society.
I largely agree that there is a lot of crap on social media, but there is also a lot of good stuff, like peer reviewed science and well referenced documentaries on climate science, renewable energy and so forth.
Social media is simply a marketplace that can be both a loonie store full of cheap trinkets or an organic food store full of nutritious things. It's impossible to protect people from being too gullible, but it is important to counter the crap when it's most necessary to do so, and that's often by using the same platforms to post intelligent rebuttal until such time the platform itself becomes completely toxic (e.g. Twitter under a new owner). That's the point when they lose readers with critical thinking skills, who more often switch to sites where adult discourse can occur.
I opened a Facebook account years ago, only to be flooded in short order by people I never knew existed wanting to be my "friend." Then the issue of the rampant exploitation of personal data was exposed. I decided to abandon my FB account as the result.
We have the choice to participate in social media or not. FB is pretty handy for families to stay in touch and for business purposes, and accounts can be locked down to an extent or limited to a select group, or the content limited to innocuous stuff that's boring to the public but still generates targeted but harmless advertising toward the individuals registered in the account. One can also count him/herself out and depart from any FB activity altogether.
It's a choice.
But, is it a choice?
I use FB in a limited way (the more I limit use, the more FB fills up my feed with crap), YouTube, and (rarely) LinkedIn and Mastodon. I left X when Musk bought it.
Digital products (i.e. platforms) are natural monopolies. As social life has an increasing on-line component, people converge on a very small number of sites. One can choose to participate or not, but participation involves following whatever rules and practices the monopoly decides upon. Social media is an integral part of life, and a cause of much strife; because of its monopoly power, its present-day 'necessity', and its harms, it cries out for regulation.
With respect, Alex, I think your laissez-faire outlook regarding social media is rose-coloured if not naive. The ads aren't innocuous. Neither is Surveillance Capitalism. Social media companies are actively involved in implementing addiction protocols to keep users on their screens for as long as possible so as to maximize their profits.
A book you might start in on is Shoshana Zuboff's, "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power". There are many others; I'm about to dive into, "The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World." Cory Doctorow also writes intelligently on the topic.
Social Media is a class of product; why should it not be regulated, as other products are, to limit or preclude damage done as a result of its use?
I agree that there are many valuable ways that the internet has been used. But there are other uses that are very detrimental to society.
Fair enough. You make a very potent case for some form of regulation, although I think that effort would have to be international in scope.
However, so far the results of mining my digital data on Google via search history, Gmail and YouTube have been fairly innocuous with ads popping up in my inbox, 99.9% of which I quickly delete without opening them.
I am aware that my boring data is stored and sold to other organizations and cannot really be traced except perhaps by high level hackers and coders.
None of that pevents me from accessing very informative and interesting sites that offer orders of magnitude greater utility than the inconvenience of deleting ads and the knowkedge that my data is stored for use in making profit.
Twitter, X and FB have crossed a line with management taking hard political directions, defending their intrusion into privacy and promising to change while covering up their efforts, and outright political censorship of public input management disagrees with. These are the reasons I abandoned FB and will never buy products or participate in any platform that Elon Musk has his filthy hands on. The man even supports Putin and has made things difficult for Ukraine to defend itself through his manipulation of StarLink signals.
Google is probably next on the abandonment list, but so far it's pretty handy and does offer a lot of unmutilated good information.
The de facto online privacy regime, in my opinion, is set by American policy (though the EU is taking substantial independent action). American policy related to what is published online is very much dependent on "Section 230", which gives immunity to websites/ platforms (X, FB , YouTube, etc.) for what 3rd parties post to their sites.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230
Section 230 has created our online world, as it exists. If one is content with that world, then nothing needs to change.
If, on the other hand, one wants to bring accountability to speech posted online, the place to start is, IMO, killing section 230.
In other news...
Why should I be concerned about on-line privacy and surveillance?
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/if-im-not-doing…
https://www.google.com/search?q=why+should+I+care+about+online+surveill…
https://www.google.com/search?q=why+should+I+be+concerned+about+interne…
My previous post was a reply to Alex Botta. Unfortunately, CNO comments have limited indentation.
It truly is amazing how powerful our PM is! The entire western half of North America - and many other parts of the world - are suffering heat domes and firestorms and it is all his fault? With that extent of global influence and control perhaps we should keep him and bow down to his omnipotence. Can people on social media become anymore delusional? Smh
LOL! Yep, Trudeau also controls the world price of oil, the World Health Organization and is subserviant to the Aga Khan.
Trudeau is to conservatives what the Mexican border is to Trump. They would be lost without the object to base their hate and blame on.
How insensitive and insulting to Jasper (and area) residents to have to suffer, on top of everything else, the half-baked opinions and fever dreams of political hacks spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories about who should have done what and when. There will be plenty of “responsibility” to go around, for current and many, many previous governments, all levels and all provinces. The fault is shared. In the meantime, for all those who blame one level of government or another, divine whimsy, or whatever their particular poison happens to be, maybe just hold your water… a little kindness and empathy would go a long way right now.
I hear you Jaime on the tedious predictability of the increasingly and weirdly vicious blame game people rush so breathlessly toward; I never "got" reality TV either, thought it was too stupid and/or mean to last, but it turns out hell really IS other people eh?!
But I must also observe that mining the emotions of people to the extent that CBC now does during these increasing disasters is also off-putting in another way.
I read somewhere recently on the growing topic of how toxic social media is that people are simply not meant to have quite so much to do with each other, period.
I concur, and long for the days when certain people were confined to their own normal and naturally limited social group.
Our Leadership, especially here in the West is clueless, misinformed and provides misinformation. And our next PM in 2025 will be worse as his goal is to half the federal government and reduce spending. Wow, that will provide leadership. Absolutely clueless heading to oblivion
There are a couple of facts the deluded anti-climate narrative would find hard to counter.
These fires always follow periods of drought, and their size and intensity are always directly proportional to the extent and duration of drought. The focus on the fire should also be concentrated on the root cause.
Alberta and much of Western Canada are in the third year of a deep drought. Climate change exacerbates drought cycles, namely their frequency, intensity and duration beyond historical norms.
Petro government officials portraying big forest fires and unusually long a deep droughts as "normal" or "natural" while shedding tears for the cameras in Jasper need to be called out for their hypocrisy and schoolyard mantras of denial.
Today's grandchildren will live in a much changed world when they arrive at senior citizenship. Who knows what kind of world the grandchildren of today's granchildren will be forced to live in?
There is a tendency in today's political and corporate leadership to ignore their future legacy. But the historical record will persist despite the efforts of future descendents to excuse their ancestor's legacy.
So what does the ordinary person do to counter all this misinformation? It is clear that the unhinged segment of society is eroding support for climate initiatives and life saving health measures (e.g. vaccines). Social media have provided a gigantic soapbox for angry, delusional individuals, aided by politicians like Pierre Poilievre, Danielle Smith, and others to infect people who lack critical thinking ability.
Global warming aside, maybe the disaster could have been prevented if Danielle Smith and her team did not cut tens of millions of dollars from the fire fighting budget.
Here we go again with right wing Loonies fabricated conspiracy theories. I feel sorry for them as they seem to have nothing to do but dream up ludicrous ideas and make them real in their minds. The others caught by their imaginary ghosts seem to be beyond hope. One cannot discuss reality with them as they distrust everything and Everyone expect the internet social media. Move to Viking Alberta and get a real taste of conspiracy on steroids with seniors coffee group. I could put a twoonie on the table and they would say it's a fake.
Here we go again with right wing Loonies fabricated conspiracy theories. I feel sorry for them as they seem to have nothing to do but dream up ludicrous ideas and make them real in their minds. The others caught by their imaginary ghosts seem to be beyond hope. One cannot discuss reality with them as they distrust everything and Everyone expect the internet social media. Move to Viking Alberta and get a real taste of conspiracy on steroids with seniors coffee group. I could put a twoonie on the table and they would say it's a fake.