As Australia continues to battle bushfires of unprecedented size and ferocity, a social media disinformation campaign is pushing false conspiracy theories about their cause.

Tweets with the hashtag #ArsonEmergency are coming from a “much higher” proportion of bot-like or troll-like accounts than those with more general bushfire-related hashtags such as #BushfireAustralia or #AustraliaFire, according to initial analysis by Dr Timothy Graham from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

Graham came to look at #ArsonEmergency because it was being used by some of the more suspicious-looking individual Twitter accounts he’d been tracking.

“They 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,” he told ZDNet on Tuesday.

Those last two are conspiracy theories, he said.

The Greens, or “greenies” in general, have not blocked hazard reduction burning in bushfire-prone areas. In fact they support it.

And while some bushfires are caused by arson, there is no evidence to suggest that the current season has seen a higher level of this crime.

In New South Wales, one of the two states hit hardest by the bushfires so far, only 24 people have been charged with arson. This compares with 53 people charged with failing to comply with a total fire ban, and 47 people who tossed a lit cigarette, or match.

These are just a few examples of the massive amount of bushfire-related misinformation currently circulating online.
Using AI to answer “Bot or not?”

Graham collected a sample of the tweets from January 1 to January 6 using the Python-based scraper twint and ran them through the R package tweetbotornot. That second tool assigns each Twitter account a score from 0 (definitely not a bot) to 1 (definitely a bot).

“Lo and behold, when I ran it through the tweetbotornot fancy AI model, it showed that there’s a really high proportion of suspected bots], much higher than we would expect based on… all the other hashtags that are happening at the moment,” he said.

see graphs..’

https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-bots-and-trolls-promote-conspiracy-theories-about-australian-bushfires/

sarahs mum said:

As Australia continues to battle bushfires of unprecedented size and ferocity, a social media disinformation campaign is pushing false conspiracy theories about their cause.

Tweets with the hashtag #ArsonEmergency are coming from a “much higher” proportion of bot-like or troll-like accounts than those with more general bushfire-related hashtags such as #BushfireAustralia or #AustraliaFire, according to initial analysis by Dr Timothy Graham from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

Graham came to look at #ArsonEmergency because it was being used by some of the more suspicious-looking individual Twitter accounts he’d been tracking.

“They 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,” he told ZDNet on Tuesday.

Those last two are conspiracy theories, he said.

The Greens, or “greenies” in general, have not blocked hazard reduction burning in bushfire-prone areas. In fact they support it.

And while some bushfires are caused by arson, there is no evidence to suggest that the current season has seen a higher level of this crime.

In New South Wales, one of the two states hit hardest by the bushfires so far, only 24 people have been charged with arson. This compares with 53 people charged with failing to comply with a total fire ban, and 47 people who tossed a lit cigarette, or match.

These are just a few examples of the massive amount of bushfire-related misinformation currently circulating online.
Using AI to answer “Bot or not?”

Graham collected a sample of the tweets from January 1 to January 6 using the Python-based scraper twint and ran them through the R package tweetbotornot. That second tool assigns each Twitter account a score from 0 (definitely not a bot) to 1 (definitely a bot).

“Lo and behold, when I ran it through the tweetbotornot fancy AI model, it showed that there’s a really high proportion of suspected bots], much higher than we would expect based on… all the other hashtags that are happening at the moment,” he said.

see graphs..’

https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-bots-and-trolls-promote-conspiracy-theories-about-australian-bushfires/

What should we do to put these people away. Being lawful and upstanding does not seem to be working, perhaps we should tread quietly and go after these people like FBI did with the big mobsters and take them down in anyway possible, because these people are just as dangerous if not more so.

PermeateFree said:

sarahs mum said:

As Australia continues to battle bushfires of unprecedented size and ferocity, a social media disinformation campaign is pushing false conspiracy theories about their cause.

Tweets with the hashtag #ArsonEmergency are coming from a “much higher” proportion of bot-like or troll-like accounts than those with more general bushfire-related hashtags such as #BushfireAustralia or #AustraliaFire, according to initial analysis by Dr Timothy Graham from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

Graham came to look at #ArsonEmergency because it was being used by some of the more suspicious-looking individual Twitter accounts he’d been tracking.

“They 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,” he told ZDNet on Tuesday.

Those last two are conspiracy theories, he said.

The Greens, or “greenies” in general, have not blocked hazard reduction burning in bushfire-prone areas. In fact they support it.

And while some bushfires are caused by arson, there is no evidence to suggest that the current season has seen a higher level of this crime.

In New South Wales, one of the two states hit hardest by the bushfires so far, only 24 people have been charged with arson. This compares with 53 people charged with failing to comply with a total fire ban, and 47 people who tossed a lit cigarette, or match.

These are just a few examples of the massive amount of bushfire-related misinformation currently circulating online.
Using AI to answer “Bot or not?”

Graham collected a sample of the tweets from January 1 to January 6 using the Python-based scraper twint and ran them through the R package tweetbotornot. That second tool assigns each Twitter account a score from 0 (definitely not a bot) to 1 (definitely a bot).

“Lo and behold, when I ran it through the tweetbotornot fancy AI model, it showed that there’s a really high proportion of suspected bots], much higher than we would expect based on… all the other hashtags that are happening at the moment,” he said.

see graphs..’

https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-bots-and-trolls-promote-conspiracy-theories-about-australian-bushfires/

What should we do to put these people away. Being lawful and upstanding does not seem to be working, perhaps we should tread quietly and go after these people like FBI did with the big mobsters and take them down in anyway possible, because these people are just as dangerous if not more so.

Bots aren’t people and once released they continue to do what they were designed to do after their makers are dead.

roughbarked said:

PermeateFree said:

sarahs mum said:

As Australia continues to battle bushfires of unprecedented size and ferocity, a social media disinformation campaign is pushing false conspiracy theories about their cause.

Tweets with the hashtag #ArsonEmergency are coming from a “much higher” proportion of bot-like or troll-like accounts than those with more general bushfire-related hashtags such as #BushfireAustralia or #AustraliaFire, according to initial analysis by Dr Timothy Graham from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

Graham came to look at #ArsonEmergency because it was being used by some of the more suspicious-looking individual Twitter accounts he’d been tracking.

“They 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,” he told ZDNet on Tuesday.

Those last two are conspiracy theories, he said.

The Greens, or “greenies” in general, have not blocked hazard reduction burning in bushfire-prone areas. In fact they support it.

And while some bushfires are caused by arson, there is no evidence to suggest that the current season has seen a higher level of this crime.

In New South Wales, one of the two states hit hardest by the bushfires so far, only 24 people have been charged with arson. This compares with 53 people charged with failing to comply with a total fire ban, and 47 people who tossed a lit cigarette, or match.

These are just a few examples of the massive amount of bushfire-related misinformation currently circulating online.
Using AI to answer “Bot or not?”

Graham collected a sample of the tweets from January 1 to January 6 using the Python-based scraper twint and ran them through the R package tweetbotornot. That second tool assigns each Twitter account a score from 0 (definitely not a bot) to 1 (definitely a bot).

“Lo and behold, when I ran it through the tweetbotornot fancy AI model, it showed that there’s a really high proportion of suspected bots], much higher than we would expect based on… all the other hashtags that are happening at the moment,” he said.

see graphs..’

https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-bots-and-trolls-promote-conspiracy-theories-about-australian-bushfires/

What should we do to put these people away. Being lawful and upstanding does not seem to be working, perhaps we should tread quietly and go after these people like FBI did with the big mobsters and take them down in anyway possible, because these people are just as dangerous if not more so.

Bots aren’t people and once released they continue to do what they were designed to do after their makers are dead.

But those who think these schemes up and put them into being are.

PermeateFree said:

roughbarked said:

PermeateFree said:

What should we do to put these people away. Being lawful and upstanding does not seem to be working, perhaps we should tread quietly and go after these people like FBI did with the big mobsters and take them down in anyway possible, because these people are just as dangerous if not more so.

Bots aren’t people and once released they continue to do what they were designed to do after their makers are dead.

But those who think these schemes up and put them into being are.

They are a product of our society.

I think around 80 percent of the population are stupid.

This is on a scale from most stupid to least stupid, with more people being the least stupid.

The most stupid are very dangerous.

The least stupid can still throw cigarette butts out of car windows, one butt can cause a major fire.

there are bigger problems I reckon, that’d usually rate as mundane in how they’re dealt with in typical unelectrified life

social media networking (the machines) have no awareness of the normal inhibitory aspects of, broadly, the social instincts, or social processing, nor do they have much intelligence about how humans have space between them (physical space), so you add industrial scale associations (as a theory of how minds work, just to conceptualize what I mean, something resembling applied associationism), which all amount to effective distortions, then people are left to resolve the distortions, which essentially manufactures or captures and feeds an audience

it’s normal for humans to have space or distance between them, a lot of the time, it’s practical and necessary

for example, most of Australia is not on fire, a lot of it wouldn’t even burn

the electrification makes it seem smaller, and people closer, quite simply a distortion of reality

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-08/fires-misinformation-being-spread-through-social-media/11846434

transition said:

there are bigger problems I reckon, that’d usually rate as mundane in how they’re dealt with in typical unelectrified life

social media networking (the machines) have no awareness of the normal inhibitory aspects of, broadly, the social instincts, or social processing, nor do they have much intelligence about how humans have space between them (physical space), so you add industrial scale associations (as a theory of how minds work, just to conceptualize what I mean, something resembling applied associationism), which all amount to effective distortions, then people are left to resolve the distortions, which essentially manufactures or captures and feeds an audience

it’s normal for humans to have space or distance between them, a lot of the time, it’s practical and necessary

for example, most of Australia is not on fire, a lot of it wouldn’t even burn

the electrification makes it seem smaller, and people closer, quite simply a distortion of reality

i’d add too there are people of very limited psychological mindedness, their capacity to think about thinking, their own thinking and others, is so limited, the depth of orders of intentionality so impoverished, they’re a liability

sarahs mum said:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-08/fires-misinformation-being-spread-through-social-media/11846434

Did the ABC mention about social media saying that critics of Scomo were being rounded up by men in black cars, hundreds of them.

Peak Warming Man said:

sarahs mum said:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-08/fires-misinformation-being-spread-through-social-media/11846434

Did the ABC mention about social media saying that critics of Scomo were being rounded up by men in black cars, hundreds of them.

don’t think it really got any traction anywhere except a few on social media. so maybe don’t be so disingenuous.

• Did the ABC mention about social media saying that critics of Scomo were being rounded up by men in black cars, hundreds of them.

Black cars? I’d would have thought something bigger would be employed, maybe something like this:

furious said:

• Did the ABC mention about social media saying that critics of Scomo were being rounded up by men in black cars, hundreds of them.

Black cars? I’d would have thought something bigger would be employed, maybe something like this:

Agents D & H

sarahs mum said:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-08/fires-misinformation-being-spread-through-social-media/11846434

Yeah I had to correct a girl in the supermarket today. She was quoting off facebook.

furious said:

• Did the ABC mention about social media saying that critics of Scomo were being rounded up by men in black cars, hundreds of them.

Black cars? I’d would have thought something bigger would be employed, maybe something like this:

Perfect.

sarahs mum said:

https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1214565369697845249?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1214565369697845249&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sbs.com.au%2Fnews%2Ffalse-arson-claims-spread-on-social-media-amid-australian-bushfire-crisis