The Amazon rainforest is burning. As often happens during a tragedy, false information started to circulate immediately following the initial reports of the massive fires ravaging the already threatened ecosystem. Pictures purportedly showing the current ongoing devastation popped up on Facebook and WhatsApp, despite actually showing fires from years ago, often on continents far away.

The scale and the scope of false information on the fires dwarfed that which spread during similar catastrophes. Disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories, hyperpartisan news, Twitter traffic manipulation, and misleading memes all intermingled online, overwhelming internet users’ efforts to distinguish truth from fiction. The lack of reliable data about fires and deforestation in the Amazon — much of this data is reported only at the end of the calendar year, so most analyses were based on partial results — created further room for error, speculation, and lies.

The main implications of false information spreading in this context were twofold. First, misinformation diverted attention from concrete problem-solving to a debate about the veracity of the available information. Second, as people were bombarded with high volumes of conflicting information, they found it increasingly difficult and time-consuming to differentiate between truth and falsehood. This can, in turn, make audiences more vulnerable to influence operations and manipulated narratives pushed by state and non-state actors.

The Amazon is on fire

The debate on the Amazon fires primarily concerns their severity, and in part arises from the lack of conclusive data on fire activity and deforestation in the region.

Fires in the Amazon are often intentional and man-made; the region does not experience wildfires due to the extreme humidity. Fires are also common at this time of year as a result of routine agricultural and logging practices. After cutting trees, loggers and farmers burn the organic debris to prepare the land for agriculture or cattle-breeding. These fires are usually ignited in August, during the rainforest’s dry season.

The conflicting reports about this year’s fires began circulating before there was consolidated data for the entire month of August; the lack of reliable data in part explains the confusion.

Until August 16, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) satellites did not detect abnormal fire activity in the region. On its website, the agency stated, “an analysis of NASA satellite data indicated that total fire activity across the Amazon basin this year has been close to the average in comparison to the past 15 years.”

On August 25, NASA updated its findings, as satellites detected a peak in fire activity: “[F]ire detections in 2019 are higher across the Brazilian Amazon than in any year since 2010,” the agency wrote.

Two graphs from NASA using different methodologies show an increase in the number of counted fires over the previous seven years. (Source: NASA/archive)

Abnormally dry years, such as those affected by the weather phenomenon El Niño, often result in a spike in the number of fires in the Amazon. The 2019 dry season, however, has not been drier than average, indicating that the increased fire activity is difficult to attribute to weather conditions alone.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has close ties to the agribusiness sector. Many of his close allies and relatives, including his son, Carlos Bolsonaro, Minister of the Environment Ricardo Salles, and Minister of Foreign Affairs Ernesto Araújo have questioned the existence of climate change. Even though blazes are more common than usual so far in 2019, the government has fined only one-third the number of people for breaking environmental laws as it did in 2018.

Deforestation also appears to be occurring at a faster rate this year, even though the data for 2019 is still partial. Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) uses two different systems to monitor the rainforest. The first, Deter, is a less accurate system that aims to serve as a tool to notify government agents on the ground about possible new locations of deforestation. The second, Prodes, produces more accurate results on the overall pace of deforestation.

Results from Prodes, however, are only published at the end of each year, which means the results that are available now derive solely from Deter’s preliminary data. For 2019 to date, Deter shows that, in July, alerts about possible new deforestation were at their highest point since 2015.