As thousands of British Columbians return to their homes to see what’s left in the wake of aggressive wildfires, misinformation researchers are warning that the crisis is being exploited by bad actors, including profiteers and foreign operatives.
It’s difficult to determine misinformation from disinformation since it’s impossible to determine the intent, but there’s little question that profit and political influence continue to motivate online posts ranging from convincing artificial intelligence videos to viral memes.
“What the research shows is that there’s a lot of actors that will try to take advantage of events like wildfires or earthquakes, and in some cases we can see foreign countries that are have like malicious intent toward Canada using these events to increase mistrust in government,” said Jean-Christophe Boucher, associate professor in the department of political science at the University of Calgary.
CTV News presented Boucher with some social media posts that have been increasing in circulation this year suggesting that billions of Canadian aid dollars sent to Ukraine could be better spent buying water bombers to battle domestic wildfires, asking if the prevalence of those posts and talking points suggested Russian-backed interference.
“When people tie issues to Ukraine, that usually kind of starts to smell like how Russia would do this and warrants further investigation to see whether or not these groups have been either seeded by Russian narratives or are being amplified by Russia,” Boucher said.
The profit motive
Canadian researchers point out profit is the primary motive in social media and YouTube posts that tend to mix facts with conjecture and outright misinformation, which American researchers have also documented.
B.C.’s forests minister has expressed frustration about the amount of enhanced or outright fabricated social media content depicting wildfires as worse than they are in order to profit from the destruction of homes and property.
“These AI videos and copy posts and all that sort of stuff, they’ll fool anyone,” said Ravi Parmar in a one-on-one interview with CTV News. “I got a lot of words for people who make time out of their days to be able to confuse and scare people—they have way too much time on their hands and there’s a special place in hell for them.”
When CTV News asked the BC Wildfire Service to respond to remarkably realistic AI-generated video purportedly depicting their own personnel and firefighters posted to YouTube, a spokesperson described it as “troubling” and encouraged the public to stick to government sources and legitimate news outlets.
Difficult to distinguish
When he visited Penticton last week to survey the damage from the Bald Range wildfire, Premier David Eby acknowledged that information and images provided by the B.C. Wildfire service are critical to public trust.
“I want to recognize the challenge of some of the misinformation that can circulate very quickly in the absence of official photographs, video, and so on that people can rely on— and especially in this era of AI imagery,” he told reporters.
Some of the content reviewed by CTV News included tiny writing acknowledging “artificial intelligence content” while some portions of video that’s clearly fabricated includes a watermark indicating it’s the product of a computer program. The United States is the country of origin for some of the accounts, which typically don’t have any contact information or indication they’re anything other than a news aggregator or content creator.
“We have to be careful on what we consume and what we share with others,” said Boucher. “Our entire information space is kind of ripe for manipulation where we have either foreign governments or just malicious actors using and manipulating information space for our attention and a capacity to shape events, if they want to.”
