Elise Thomas on Disinformation and the Australia Fires
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2020
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For the past several months, Australia has been struck by massive bushfires like nothing seen before in recent memory. As the country has grappled with the spread of these unprecedented blazes, it’s also grappled with the spread of falsehoods about what caused them.
This week on our Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Elise Thomas, a journalist and researcher at the Australia Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Center. Elise has been tracking misinformation and disinformation around the blazes—from the suggestion by the right-wing Australian press that arson, not climate change, is to blame for the fires, to online conspiracy theories imported in from the United States. They talked not only about the fires, but also about the global nature of the fight against mis- and disinformation online and why we need to be cautious about focusing too much on bots in waging that fight.
Elise was calling in from Canberra, and unfortunately we had some audio glitches, but it's too great a conversation to miss.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:33.9 | One of the responses to a lot of this media reporting about the quote unquote information |
| 0:38.6 | attack, the response on Twitter from some people was to start talking about whether the |
| 0:42.6 | government was running a disinformation campaign. |
| 0:46.0 | And so there you go, you've got misinformation about disinformation about conspiracy theory. |
| 0:50.8 | I'm Quinted Jurassic and this is the LawFair podcast January 30th, 2020. |
| 0:57.7 | For the past several months, Australia has been struck by massive bushfires like nothing |
| 1:02.2 | seen before in recent memory. |
| 1:04.6 | As the country is grappled with the spread of these unprecedented blazes, it's also |
| 1:08.8 | grappled with the spread of falsehoods about what caused them. |
| 1:12.8 | This week, on our Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Avalon Duwek and I spoke |
| 1:17.6 | with Elise Thomas, a journalist and researcher at the Australia Strategic Policy Institute's |
| 1:23.5 | International Cyber Policy Center. |
| 1:26.3 | Elise has been tracking misinformation and disinformation around the blazes. |
| 1:30.6 | From the suggestion by the right-wing Australian press that arson, not climate change, is |
| 1:35.5 | to blame for the fires to online conspiracy theories imported in from the United States. |
| 1:41.3 | We talked not only about the fires, but also about the global nature of the fight against |
| 1:45.7 | mis and disinformation online, and why we need to be cautious about focusing too much |
... |
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