When the Bush Creek East wildfire was destroying homes in the Central Okanagan and raining embers upon Kelowna in the summer of 2023, the event was shocking not only to evacuees, but to observers across the country. Blair Visscher was shocked for more reasons than one. Visscher, a Vernon resident, had her eye on Facebook as many at the time did, looking for information about the rapidly unfolding emergency. What she saw there was troubling. Images of flames, smoke and destruction aside, she found a worrying level of divisive messages, conspiracy theories, and misinformation at a time when critical information was most needed. The Bush Creek East wildfire emergency was bifurcated in an important way. It ignited on July 12 and wasn’t classified as being held until late September at 45,600 hectares. In the middle of that stretch of time, on Aug. 2, news articles sharing information about the blaze vanished from Facebook. That’s because parent company Meta had begun stripping Canadian news from its Facebook and Instagram platforms as its way of dodging the Online News Act, a federal policy that targeted the Silicon Valley giants that aimed to recoup some of the value those platforms enjoyed as a result of having Canadian journalism on their platforms. Instead of Meta paying for Canadian news to exist on its platforms, Canadian news simply stopped existing there. Low-quality information is now filling the void on Facebook left by the departure of news media. It’s a topic that Visscher has deeply delved into in her master’s thesis at UBC Okanagan (UBCO). “My hypothesis was that the Meta news ban really created an information vacuum into which conspiracy narratives could really take off,” Visscher told The Morning Star Tuesday morning, Aug. 11, a day after she did a site tour with Okanagan Indian Band (OKIB) leadership of the Bradley Creek wildfire. Working with her supervisor, environmental humanities professor Greg Garrard, Visscher explored ways she could track the growth of conspiracy narratives, “and what’s going on for people that those things seem to gain so much more traction than official information,” she said. She quickly realized she would need to look at algorithmic pressures on Facebook, ones that people rarely think about when they’re using the platform. The Meta news ban only exasperated an existing problem, Visscher discovered. She traced the first seeds of social distrust, and distrust in government and expertise, to the COVID-19 pandemic. “There was very little repair done in terms of rebuilding of government trust or trust in experts,” she said, adding her forthcoming PhD is moving towards explorations of how to repair that trust. For her master’s thesis, she studied three wildfire events: Fort McMurray in 2016, White Rock Lake in 2021 and Bush Creek East in 2023. She’s spent time living in all of these affected areas. Beyond that, together these fires form an instructive timeline. Fort McMurray took place before the pandemic, and Visscher noted a high level of public trust in official sources of information. The White Rock Lake wildfire occurred amid the pandemic, and consequentially, her findings shifted. She found about four per cent of the Facebook discussion around White Rock Lake was conspiratorial narratives, mixed with a strong dose of distrust, anger and questioning. “Not all of that had to do with COVID-19. A lot of it, from what I saw, had to do with the Facebook algorithm, “Visscher said. “Official information existed, and a lot of people were going to Facebook to check, and it just wasn’t there because their algorithms didn’t promote it to them. So then people were like, well, there isn’t anything. If it’s not on Facebook, it doesn’t exist.” One of the main messages Visscher wants to get out there is that Facebook is not a neutral platform. “If you aren’t seeing official information, that’s likely just because your algorithm is not showing it to you,” she said. “Unfortunately, we do live in an era where we need to check our municipal website, check our regional website, check BC Wildfire Service, because there isn’t a platform that’s going to pull all that together for you in any helpful way.” Social media algorithms spit out content that is angry and divisive because those traits are what keep people on the platform longer and drive higher engagement levels, said Visscher, who reserves her most pessimistic viewpoints on the matter for what Meta might do to remedy the situation. “Meta is in the business of making money,” she said. “I don’t have high hopes that we can create change within Meta.” The issue becomes critical when a wildfire emergency strikes and people need timely and accurate information to evacuate to safety — and instead run into a wall of misinformation on a platform that has abdicated any responsibility concerning the quality of information it disseminates and actively promotes through its algorithms. It’s a problem that’s worsening over time, according to Visscher’s research. When she studied the 2023 Bush Creek East blaze, she found content promoting conspiracy theories made up 16.6 per cent of the Facebook discussion. What she’s seeing now amid this current wildfire season is a lot of questions about how wildfires are being fought, how decisions are being made about evacuation orders, or how fires are being started. She said these questions come from a good place; the problem is the conclusions people are led to by social media’s deranged algorithmic boosting of theories devoid of facts, detached from reality, but full of infuriating or otherwise engaging content. “I think a lot of the narratives that we see that lean more into what we would call conspiratorial start from a really genuine place of real questions,” she said. “We want to know more. How are these things being decided? And then people come up with answers that they think makes the most sense for them.” What can be done? While Visscher holds out no hope for Facebook to change course and take a more conscientious approach to how it builds its algorithms, she pointed to a number of things that can be done, or are already being done. “BC Wildfire Service is doing a really great job posting more educational, really interesting videos about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it,” she said. “But again, not everybody sees those.” She recommends that officials start to understand what type of content performs well on Facebook and other platforms. In other words, it’s time to make legitimate information more engaging. “Official messaging still tends to have a very traditional use of language where it’s devoid of emotion,” Visscher said. “One of my recommendations, other than just making sure you’re posting on social media, is using emotionally resonant language, trying to connect with people on a human level before offering the information, which would help be promoted by the algorithm.” Journalists, too, can devote more time to telling human-centred stories during a wildfire event, where time and resources allow. “The one thing that I saw happening starting in 2021 is the kind of uplifting of official voices and updates and much less evacuee stories during a wildfire. And I think journalists play such an important role in allowing us in our communities to see our stories uplifted, to witness our grief, and to help us understand what’s going on,” she said. “So my recommendation to journalists is, if you have the time and capacity, maybe add a story from somebody within the community first before an official update.” And, if folks could come to the understanding that climate change is driving more frequent and severe wildfires, that would make for one less question to debate, or to spin into a conspiratorial narrative. “It cannot be overstated that this is a cause of climate change,” said Visscher, who ran for the BC Green Party in Vernon—Lake Country—Monashee in the 2025 federal election. “A lot of what I see is people pushing up against that idea, that it couldn’t possibly be climate change, it has to be something else.” She ended on a hopeful note. She said when she first started this research she found it hard to read through comments she found to be aggressive or downright harmful. “By the end of this research, I’ve really just come to the understanding that everybody’s just trying to make sense of some really scary things happening in our communities. And at the end of the day, everybody has the same goal: we want everybody to be safe. We want to prepare ahead of time for fires.” It’s something she hopes people will remember when they’re feeling frustrated or discouraging by the messaging they’re seeing online. Oh — and on that front, one other piece of advice: “And then maybe just turn Facebook off for a bit and check the municipal website instead.”
B.C. womans thesis examines wildfire misinformation amid Meta news ban
