False claims suggesting that the BBC has been misreporting temperatures in southern Europe have been spreading on social media.

A clip of Neil Oliver, a GB News presenter, accusing the BBC “and others” of “driving fear” by using “supposedly terrifying temperatures”, has been viewed more than two million times.

For the past few weeks, an intense heatwave has been sweeping through parts of southern Europe and north Africa, with extensive wildfires breaking out in Greece, Italy and Algeria - leading to more than 40 deaths.

Speaking about the fires on Rhodes on GB News on Monday, Mr Oliver accused the BBC, and other broadcasters, of trying to “make people terrified of the weather”.

  • egeres@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think we need to get used to a new “life law” that has arisen as a fruit of echo chambers, too much information (regardless of its veracity) and modern recommendation algorithms: “For every important global event, there will be a small portion of deniers.”

    Besides education at early ages, I don’t see a way this trend can be stopped. “Denying” will mutate across different topics (chem-trails, vaccines, the shape of the earth). I’m starting to perceive it like the flu, a seasonal disease with no permanent cure which we just take for granted. When you do your new years resolution/planning you should remember to subtract 2 weeks from your time because certainly you will be ill, it’s a constant. My head has grown accustomed to expecting this constant flux of fake-information-toxicity to appear in “obvious universal problems”

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Is it new? Weren’t there moon landing deniers and JFK conspiracy people and Truthers within a year, long before the modern Internet algorithm nonsense.

      • Wrench@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        What’s new is that they didn’t have a great way of banding together. The village idiots were shunned, or had small groups that wiser people just rolled their eyes at.

        Now they’re bigger and more organized, to the point that the size / availability of their crazy ideas seems to lend credibility for many.

        And that money is being poured in to weaponize their chaos and hate.