We studied thousands of anonymous posts about the Parkland attack & found a conspiracy in the making

[DonViejo]

By Craig Timberg and Drew Harwell February 27 at 7:08 PM

Forty-seven minutes after news broke of a high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., the posters on the anonymous chat board 8chan had devised a plan to bend the public narrative to their own designs: “Start looking for [Jewish] numerology and crisis actors.”

The voices from this dark corner of the Internet quickly coalesced around a plan of attack: Use details gleaned from news reports and other sources to push false information about one of America’s deadliest school shootings.

The posters on anonymous forums, a cauldron of far-right extremist politics, over the next few hours speculated about the shooter’s ethnicity (“Hope the kid isn’t white”) and cracked off-color jokes. They began crafting false explanations about the massacre, including that actors were posing as students, in hopes of blunting what they correctly guessed would be a revived interest in gun control.

The success of this effort would soon illustrate how lies that thrive on raucous online platforms increasingly shape public understanding of major events. As much of the nation mourned, the story concocted on anonymous chat rooms soon burst onto YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, where the theories surged in popularity.

Amid corporate efforts to beat back the falsehoods, the episode became the latest cautionary tale about how the Internet itself had become a potent tool of deception wielded by political extremists, disinformation warriors and conspiracy theorists.

more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/we-studied-thousands-of-anonymous-posts-about-the-parkland-attack---and-found-a-conspiracy-in-the-making/2018/02/27/04a856be-1b20-11e8-b2d9-08e748f892c0_story.html

[gratuitous]

1. One by one, box by box

Everything - EVERYTHING - the popular media report when interviewing these assholes about the horrible, rotten, no-good tactics of the Social Justice Warriors, the Feminazis, the Liberal Media, turn out to be practiced by them. Here's the Washington Post, doing its own research and analysis, and within minutes of the news breaking of yet another school massacre, they find the little troll farms hatching their plans. And wouldn't you just know it? It turns out that everything - again, EVERYTHING - that Fox News and similar slimy outlets claim the evil liberals do, here are these anonymous little fuckers discussing and doing in real time. The popular media never find actual evidence of evil liberal plots, but they dutifully report that that's what Fox and Rush and Drudge are saying about liberals. It's out there. Gotta report it, even without any facts or evidence.

But actual evidence of the birth and promulgation of extremist conspiracy theories is uncovered by the Post, laid out for everyone to see. How much of this is going to spread across the popular media? Will Today have a segment? Will 60 Minutes do a story on this? Gonna see any of this on the evening news? Or is it all just too complicated and insider-ish to tell the story?

[pangaia]

10. NET NEUTRALITY

And as NN disappears, it will get even worse.
Much, much worse...

The new PRAVDA, XINHUA, CCTV, PEOPLE'S DAILY...

FOX will be even more powerful...

[IronLionZion]

13. And we have to pay to get real journalism

much of the BS is out there for free. I pay for WaPo because I support this type of investigative reporting and want more of it. Many others will only see the initial lies from the free sources. It shifts public perception towards the right.

[Moostache]

2. People are the problem...always have been.

Gullible, misinformed idiots who get their news from social media feeds are the scourge of the early 21st century. They believe ANYTHING that suits their inherent bias and question NOTHING. These people are the ones that crave "likes" and "favorites" like sugar and heroin. They are incapable of reason or rational thought and yet they retain voting rights and are malleable to anyone with a keyboard, sinister intent and time to stoke the fires in the early moments of an issue being "hot" or "trending".

There is no law or control mechanism that can help educate the morons. They are the product of the destruction of our social safety nets, our public schools and schooling expectations in general, and they represent the intended outcome of right wing attacks on all of these systems - easily fooled and easily manipulated useful idiots. Stick a simpleton slogan in their heads, wind them up and let them go.

[Orange Free State]

3. So dialogue in this country is being controlled and driven

by children living in their mom’s basement. All they need is for a dozen of them to repeat the same message, and the deplorables will guzzle it like cold beer on a hot day. Ugh, it is not my world any more.

[FakeNoose]

5. No many of these trolls are foreign

The trolls farms that are here in the US take instructions and money from foreign bosses.
This is a hostile take-over of American social media and most of them (Facebook especially) just ignored it.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

4. Pretty scummy people

[lostnfound]

6. How can the society rein in what I call the hate factory?

There was a saying once: “America is great because America is good”

Decency comes and goes, in various eras and civilizations. A society that attacks people who survived a mass shooting, let alone TEENAGERS that survived a mass shooting, is so sick.

How are people drawn into this? What can be done to inoculate people against this, or to reprogram the hate?

[LAS14]

7. We need a movie about this. It's the only way to get this kind of...

... information out to people who might need it. A movie with lots of publicity... big name actors. Good for these researchers!!!!

[Chakaconcarne]

8. Heard recently on NPR that journalists jobs are twice as hard these days....

because they are having to verify whether a report is fake or not... At least they are being diligent to prevent this kind of thing from hitting MSM. Doesn't help however when so many get their news from Facebook and twitter....

[Mosby]

9. why does always have to be "the jews"

Couldn't they pick someone else for a change? Mix it up a little, keep it fresh. I hear the Amish don't like guns.

[benld74]

11. Real crisis actors are in NRATV

[DownriverDem]

12. This time

I truly don't think it will work. Too many folks are on to the right. We just aren't going to believe them anymore.

[gratuitous]

14. I think it's losing some of its punch

And yes, some of the more obvious nonsense got tagged early. But we still had to go through a week or so of bullshit about "crisis actors" and "CNN doctored its script" before the lie got put to them. And somewhere down the line, in a month or a few months or a year from now, these zombie lies will burst forth again from the coffin. People with poor memories will think to themselves, "Yeah, I remember now; I saw a photo of that high school kid in Florida being interviewed in California some months before. It's all just a fake and a hype."

Keep your facts handy and catalogued. These assholes just keep coming back and coming back with their lies.

[lady lib]

15. Why isn't there a law against this

or is there?