Iranian, Mexicans falsely blamed for California wildfires

Wildfires in northern California earlier this month killed over 40 people and destroyed thousands of homes.

How did they start? Faulty power lines may have played a role, but it’s hard to tell.

Dry weather and high winds didn’t help.

For many though, blaming outsiders of one kind or another was tempting:

Breitbart blamed a homeless Mexican man named Jesus Fabian Gonzalez. Gonzalez had been charged with arson by Sonoma County officials, but the arson charge related to a campfire he set in a park to keep himself warm a week after local wildfires started. “There is no indication that Gonzalez had anything to do with these fires and it appears highly unlikely,” the local sheriff’s department said in a statement.

Gonzalez at least exists. A dubious site claimed that Gonzalez had led police to the real arsonist: a 23-year-old Iranian named Muhammad Islam. That account quoted a Fox story which Fox never in fact published. The photo in it is of Omar-al-Abed, a Palestinian who can’t set fires in California because he’s been in prison in Israel since July.

The fires did, in fact, damage marijuana crops, and that led one site to a promising conspiracy theory: that Mexican drug cartels had set the fires. Snopes described this account as something that can “most charitably be described as thinly sourced.”

“You won’t hear this stuff from the lying mainstream media,” GotNews concludes its account, after quoting NBC and the New York Times in its story.

WATCH: At least 15 people are dead and more than 100 people are still unaccounted for in California, where multiple fires are burning through entire communities. As Ines de La Cuetara reports, the worst could be yet to come.

1:53 Death toll rises in devastating California wildfires

Sadly, the tendency to blame an outcast group for a natural catastrophe that isn’t anybody’s fault is a very old one.

The Great Fire of London, which destroyed much of the city in 1666, was blamed on Catholics, foreigners or Freemasons, depending on who was doing the finger-pointing. A plaque blaming Catholics for the fire wasn’t removed until 1830.

A French Protestant, Robert Hubert, was actually hanged for starting the fire, though his confession — which didn’t make much sense — wasn’t widely believed. The urge to blame someone for the fire was so strong, though, that Hubert’s body was torn apart by a mob when it was taken away after his execution.

Further back, plagues in the Middle Ages were frequently blamed on Jews.

In fake news news:

• Over 13,000 Twitter bots were hard at work spreading pro-Brexit messages before the referendum, a University of London study shows. Most vanished shortly afterward. BuzzFeed explains.
• How effective is Facebook’s ‘disputed’ label in making readers warier of dubious stories? It’s better than nothing, Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan writes in the New York Times.
• People see the difference between fake and real news as more of a question of degree than an absolute distinction, a Reuters Institute study shows. “Our findings suggest that, from an audience perspective, fake news is only in part about fabricated news reports narrowly defined, and much more about a wider discontent with the information landscape,” the authors write. (For what it’s worth, a useful way of thinking about fake news is as a deliberate fabrication or substantial distortion of fact, while even quite bad journalism still usually involves someone making a good-faith attempt to get at the truth.)
• Alex Jones, having first flirted with Sandy Hook conspiracy theories and then distanced himself from them in an effort to seem more mainstream after Donald Trump’s election, now blames the murders on the CIA.
• How to go about identifying fake or repurposed video? It’s a lot harder than with static images, but some tools are available, bellingcat.com explains.
• Survivors of the Las Vegas massacre who talk about their experiences or try to raise funds are being tormented by conspiracy theorists, the Guardian reports; YouTube is a large part of the problem.
• In the Washington Post: a roundup of fake news connected to Catalonia’s independence movement. Most seem to exaggerate incidents of police brutality, though there was enough real police brutality connected to the referendum that it’s not clear why anybody felt the need for fabrication.