How megafires and fake news are forcing information collapse

Through the smoke-hazed backdrafts of the worldwide megafires lighting up the climate emergency, we can see the scorched earth of another global crisis: information collapse.

From Australia’s megafires in 2019-20, to Siberia’s burning permafrost in 2020-21, to the Mediterranean alight, particularly in Greece, in 2023, and now to this year’s shocking winter burning of Los Angeles, each has been marked by a dramatic escalation of fake news and misinformation.

Each time, the key drivers of the misinformation crisis are the same: right-wing media like our own News Corp, populist politicians eager for the viral hit, and bots and trolls on social media — often amplified by authoritarian states.

It’s a fakery made of part lies, part out-of-context bullshit, part deliberate falsehoods, part carelessness about truth. Welcome to what Lydia Polgreen identified in 2019: information collapse — the dizzying unknowability of what’s right and what’s wrong.

During our bushfires, Australian norms and institutions of trust — emergency services, independent media, the public broadcaster, even state premiers — were strong enough, just, to resist the early crumbling of the solidity of truth.

In California at the moment, the fake news is visibly worse, hypercharged by AI manipulation — like the iconic Hollywood sign alight — or adaptations of images from past fires. They’re often fact-checked on news media (and by California Governor Gavin Newsom) but left to roam largely unchecked on the far more powerful social platforms.

Even more damaging are the political untruths, fed as they now are from President Donald Trump in his inaugural address and reported more or less straight by a freshly cowed legacy media. Compare this to the robust push-back against the lamentable (but oddly unlamented) Craig Kelly during Australia’s megafires.   

And there’s a new player: the big tech broligarchy (a word we needed, courtesy of misinformation journalist Natalia Antelava). Following Elon Musk’s takeover, the platform that was once Twitter has been transformed into the organising and propaganda voice of the hard right; part through changes to its algorithm, part through Musk’s amplifications and running commentary. 

Through the financial wizardry of Wall Street, Trump has become a broligarch himself, with the float of his personal microphone, Truth Social, while leading venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has become the thought leader of the anti-censorship brigade. 

The broligarchs (and their stenographers in right-wing media) have weaponised “freedom of speech” as a value that overrides truth, that renders as censorship journalistic “respect for the truth” (as Australia’s journalistic code of ethics puts it). 

Post-election, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has fallen into line, humbling himself with an apologetic abandoning (in the US, at least) of content moderation on Facebook and Instagram. He’s reshaping, too, the company’s internal diversity programs to pander to the right with an avowed more “masculine” energy.

The new Silicon Valley right has flipped “shame” in political discourse from the red-faced embarrassment of being caught making shit up to the red-pilled shame of being, gasp, woke. Right now, German politics is being roiled by Musk’s cry of  “shame” at German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier for his criticism of the country’s rising neo-fascist party, Alternative for Germany, as “fearmongers” over immigration.

Misinformation around disasters like megafires comes with a plan to advance the right’s agenda: strengthen misogyny by opposing diversity and equity (the LA fire chief is a woman and gay); dismantle public institutions with fake-news attacks on (the Democrat-run) state and city’s preparation and response to the fires, particularly with misleading information about California’s water policies; and promote climate change denialism.  

Back in Australia’s fire summer of 2019, it was right-wing legacy media News Corp that led attempts to divert attention with twin attacks on wokesters and deviants. The blame fell on greenies for blocking backburning that would have prevented the fires, denied by both firefighters and environmentalists alike. Still, fake news never completely dies: the backburning trope has long been on high rotation in Trump’s criticism of California’s land management. 

In Australia, the News Corp mastheads then pivoted focus to social deviancy with claims of arson, their reporting widely amplified through the favoured tool of climate denial — bots and trolls on social media — alongside the hashtag #Arsonemergency, designed to crowd out the previously trending #climateemergency.

In those more innocent days, the shame of falsehood still mattered. The strength of Australia’s network of independent media, fact-checkers and the public broadcaster, coupled with robust denials from police and firefighters, meant the story dropped out of public gaze. It drove the big break in the Murdoch family, with James Murdoch publicly criticising the Australian mastheads and subsequently resigning from the News Corp board 

But the hunt for appropriate villains continues. When megafires broke out in Greece in 2023, right-wing activists and the conservative government focused on their favourite target — immigrants — with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis saying: “It is also almost certain that this fire was started on routes that are often used by illegal migrants who have entered our country.”

In the US, there’s a David vs Goliath pushback against the flood of misinformation. For example, public radio and not-for-profit digital news in California, LAist and CalMatters, are filling the gap with a Wildfire Updates newsletter.

The crisis demands a new fact-based language: beginning as journalistic hyperbole, the now all-too-frequent term “megafires” has been identified in an Australian literature review as any fire burning more than 10,000 hectares.

Australia got through the misinformation challenge in 2019. With the accelerating information collapse, what will happen in the all-but-inevitable next fires?

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