Friends, it's me for @EARTH3R, freaked out that the absolutely mind-blowing storm of lies that was created to mask the role of climate in Australia's Black Summer wildfire disaster will be bigger, worse and far deadlier in America -->>>

https://earther.gizmodo.com/australia-burned-under-a-haze-of-misinformation-earlier-1845031119

I think other countries didn't get a sense of both the magnitude and spread of anti-climate messaging around Aus' fire crisis. It wasn't a News Corp only thing. It came from the PM, senior ministers, backbenchers. It came from columnists, straight-news reporters, social media...

Something I've found fascinating that's emerged over the past 24 hours or so is that the US's current flare-up of misinformation seems to be mostly on Facebook, whereas Australia's was channelled through mainstream media outlets and big political figures https://twitter.com/PolitiFact/status/1304183741431058433

I wonder if this is because the US has a far less concentrated media environment. News Corp can easily set the agenda, and that filters through to smaller commercial media not owned by NC but sharing very similar conservative, climate-denier leanings: https://twitter.com/7NewsSydney/status/1213002373766901760

I have a feeling that this is going to get *more* prominence, not less, in the US. This is my Tweetdeck feed that shows the most prominent tweets mentioning climate change:

This thread is an excellent example of the aspect of this where people intentionally muddle the distinction between ignition of fires and the factors that make the spread faster, burn in new areas and burn more intensely: https://twitter.com/Jordan_Sather_/status/1304550225198149632

In the past half hour, several prominent accounts have been taking news reports of arsonists being arrested, compiling them, and presenting them as if they're disproof of climate playing a significant role in intensifying this disaster. They're all getting wild RT's:

Now they're explicitly linking this new lie to the Australian lie. This guy just makes up an entirely new number, and adds this inventive addition of an "arsonist ring". Honestly, they're literally limited only by their imagination. https://twitter.com/RedWingGrips/status/1304858561248473089

It's getting worse, everyone. Wait until they realise they can just change the '4 people arrested' to '4,000 people arrested' without any sort of consequence from the platforms its posted on.

Remember the back-patting social media sites did for COVID misinformation?

Almost every single quote tweet of this daily mail article is presenting it as proof climate played no role in the fires