Al Kipone schreef op 14 september 2020 13:48:
dat andere geluid is op niets gebaseerde samenzweringstheorie?
As wildfires scorch the West Coast, misinformation is blazing across social media.
Rumors claim that in Oregon either left-wing, antifascist activists have set the fires or that members of the right-wing “Proud Boys” group are responsible. Neither rumor is true.
Police departments across that state have pleaded with residents to disregard the unfounded claims, and the FBI’s office in Portland issued a statement explaining that agents had investigated several such reports “and found them to be untrue.”
The FBI statement went on to warn, “Conspiracy theories and misinformation take valuable resources away [from] local fire and police agencies working around the clock to bring these fires under control. Please help our entire community by only sharing validated information from official sources.”
Despite that, some residents of Molalla — a city under a mandatory evacuation order due to its proximity to the Riverside fire, which has burned more than 130,000 acres so far — refused to leave. “There’s already reports that antifa’s in town, going down the streets looting,” one man reportedly said.
But it’s not true.
While the causes of the fires may vary, NASA explained in a recent post that the scale of the fires is due to “an unprecedented and historically rare windstorm that swept through the Cascade foothills in the afternoon of Monday Sep. 7 through the morning of Tuesday Sep. 8.”
Windstorms of that magnitude don’t usually happen until winter, the NASA post said, explaining, “In addition to the heat, it is another example of the changing weather patterns that are being seen.”
Increasingly hot, dry conditions contribute to the spread of wildfires, but rumors — like the ones seen in Oregon — often overshadow that issue on social media. We recently addressed a conspiracy theory about the fires in California, for example, and, earlier this year, we addressed claims about arson’s role in the Australian bushfires.
www.factcheck.org/2020/09/police-poli...