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On 1 May 2016, a wildfire began to spread in Fort McMurray in northeastern Alberta, Canada, leading to the mass evacuation of the oil boom town's 88,000 residents. Since then, the devastating fire, fed by bitumen and boreal forests, has consumed homes and left them little more than piles of ash. On 8 May 2016 the web site Conservative Fans started an incredibly shaky rumor that Islamic State was responsible for the fire. After definitively stating that an ISIS member claimed responsibility for the devastating blaze in a headline designed to go viral, the outlet combined both recent and months-old comments by an unidentified person to suggest that the disaster was the result of a terrorist act: In other words, the entire premise of the article hinged on anonymous social media comments made by a single individual without any vetting for credibility. On 9 May 2016, the Weather Channel reported that atypical seasonal atmospheric conditions (and, by extension, climate change) contributed to the fire's quick and devastating spread, but investigators had not yet identified the fire's cause: Inability to determine the cause of the fire remained one of the most prominent threads of reporting on 9 May 2016, one day after the Islamic State rumor began circulating: Although rumors maintained that Islamic State used forest fires as a weapon of terror, we were unable to locate any such statement made by anyone before the Fort McMurray fire began. The sheer size of the fire would be incredibly difficult to execute intentionally without demonstrated contributing factors (such as weather). Conservative Fans caused a similar brief furore with a claim (that has since been partially retracted) that Tim Horton's was removing pork from its menu in order to appease Muslims.
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