In the Company of Volcanoes

- Dr Janine Krippner Misinformation is not new. Sometimes confusion reigns and wrong information is innocently shared. Sometimes tabloids make clickbait headlines that are wildly misleading, so you visit their website and they make money. Now we also have people on social media posting misinformation for likes in stressful and even dangerous situations. I am following the situation around Santorini, where there is real danger to people experiencing frequent earthquakes. This is a situation that is truly impacting communities and there is the possibility that something worse may happen, like a larger, more damaging earthquake. Now that we have AI and much more convincing fake videos to contend with, we must be even more cautious and sceptical, especially if we are viewing something on social media. So how can we tell? Firstly, who is the source? Is it a trustworthy agency who checks facts? Is it an expert or trusted local? Or someone who tends to post a lot of dramatic videos for ...

- Janine Krippner Originally published on 20/9/2021 here: http://janinekrippner.weebly.com/la-palma when we did not have access to our blog. I am honestly angry about how misinformation about a small eruption has put so many people in a state of pure fear across multiple countries. There is enough stress and fear in the world and I truly feel for everyone being impacted by this. It is incredibly sad to see people losing their homes and livelihoods to this eruption, and on top of that is a tsunami of utter lies. We all need more compassion. We all need to be careful of what we share. We all need to be kinder. We all need to think more critically when we are afraid (this is a tough one). This is a bad case of the implications of people acting without these traits. People want us, the experts, to say that this scenario is impossible to ease fears, but that is something that is extremely difficult for a scientist to say. There are many scary things in this world that will no...