Australia bushfires spark 'unprecedented' climate disinformation

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.

The fires have claimed at least 26 lives and destroyed more than 2,000 homes across Australia.

And they have also prompted misleading online claims about the extent of the blazes and a concerted campaign to blame the crisis on arson, rather than climate change, drought or record high temperatures.

One hashtag in particular, #arsonemergency, has gained traction rapidly and conservative-leaning newspapers, websites and politicians across the globe have promoted the theory arson is largely to blame.

Timothy Graham, a digital media expert at the Queensland University of Technology, told AFP his research showed half of the Twitter users deploying the hashtag displayed bot- and troll-like behaviour.

Those accounts were created very recently, often without profile pictures. Twitter handles were sequences of numbers or characters, sometimes a meaningless combination of both.

Their tweets focused on one subject, in this case #arsonemergency; their tweets were often repetitive, and some of the accounts interacted solely with each other.

"Our findings show a concerted effort aimed to misinform the public about the cause of the bushfires," Graham said.

"The campaign is nothing on the scale of what we have been seeing in other countries, such as the 2016 US election, but this amount of disinformation in Australia is unprecedented."