The wildfires in Maui, Hawaii, had killed 96 people as of Aug. 14, making it the deadliest U.S. blaze in the past 100 ye
Many social media users are spreading baseless conspiracy theories about the origin of the fires, which began Aug. 8, saying they were set intentionally by the government for nefarious reasons.speculated about what started the fire, saying the island looked like a bomb went off. He tried to tie the fires to other common subjects about conspiracy theories: smart cities, electric vehicles and artificial intelligence.
"The governor did say this is climate change doing this. Interesting. What they don’t talk about is in January how they had in Maui a smart city conference to turn Maui into an entire smart island, changing everything to electric, renewables, solar panels and pushing everybody into electric vehicles — 15-minute smart cities," he said.
"So, now what’s also interesting is next month in September, Hawaii is hosting the digital government summit, utilizing AI to govern the island. Hm … It’s almost like they’re resetting something to start rebuilding for this." This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. featuring a video by the same speaker, who used a 2018 fire photo to falsely claim the Hawaii fires were started by the government using a direct energy weapon.
This video uses several real or planned events to baselessly suggest the Hawaii fires were purposely set so the government can remake the island. We found other
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