At a time when real people are losing their homes and lives to an event beyond their individual control, social media is optimised to increase the sense of emergency. More broadly, the surge of bushfire disinfo – served up by conspiracy theory outlets and in some cases traditional news - drives home the dilemma of disinformation faced by democracies everywhere. The response to date exposes an error in the approach to combating disinformation: the mistaken belief that fighting bad information is a variation of cybersecurity. In cybersecurity, experts battle to keep the network free of hackers and exploits. They battle to keep the network clean. The realm of information operates differently. Our minds are not cybernetworks that can be protected by taking down seemingly endless strings of flawed content or by refuting it.

Removing bad content, while important, often only makes space for more of the same. Meanwhile, the human mind seeks to make sense of the world. What the democratic citizen’s mind needs is a broad set of principles to understand and help it navigate the daily information chaos. Just looking at the US today gives us an example. Those who can consistently see through the robust Trump-era lies are those people – from the left and right – who had a firm, pre-existing notion of how US democracy functions. The knowledge of the system can’t be dislodged, no matter how seductive, outrageous or repetitive the disinformation is.

Those with a more tenuous understanding of the fundamental facts of their world are much easier to dupe with disinfo. Loading Imagine the political dimension of the fires delineated clearly from the scientific dimension. Imagine how productive the debate could be if it was isolated from the cultural trappings of the political left and right. Instead, though, what we have is a conflation of fact and reality.

While experts like economist Ross Garnaut and the CSIRO laid out the risks of climate change and the timeline years ago, the idea of action has been blurred into yet another political caricature of the right to use against the left. If Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack response to the fires in November was to deride "inner-city raving lunatics", can it be any surprise Prime Minister Scott Morrison initially stayed on holiday in Hawaii as the fires advanced? It speaks volumes about how the climate issue has been converted to a political one. Likewise, people concerned about climate change who invoke the issue as a kind of secular religion extend an almost medieval system of moral judgement on swathes of law-abiding fellow citizens. Climate change is real, yes. That doesn’t mean people – even good people – don’t feel they don’t have something big to lose from the necessary changes. There are parallels to this conflation of complex reality with myth. During the Great Depression, many in the public struggled to see the bust in the 1930s as an economic phenomenon and not a collective piece of moral payback for the financial excesses of the Roaring 1920s.

This is in part because of the desire to make sense of the world is what the brain does. The mind thinks in stories – and those on the left and the right – have integrated the environmental issue into a larger, often incomplete tale. The problem is: democracies can’t function properly if there isn’t a shared truth, no matter how broad, among the voting public. And yes, the split in our shared reality didn’t happen overnight. It has eroded for years with the help a strident, polarising Murdoch media and talkback radio, much of which is spread widely online. But social media’s ability to filter the facts, and experience, has accelerated this trend to a crisis level. This is something being learned the hard way in the US, when life and death decisions are being taken on worldviews that are only half-shared within the nation.