HOW LIBERALS AMPED UP A PARKLAND SHOOTING CONSPIRACY THEORY
THE SHOOTING AT Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine’s Day inspired an energetic group of young activists to weigh in on the national debate on guns, safety, and personal freedoms. But as they found their voice, conspiracy theories purporting that they were “crisis actors”—frauds pretending to be students—spiraled across social media and into the mainstream.
As documented elsewhere, this idea of “false flag” operations and actors being used by liberals to stage media stories for political purposes is a long-running narrative in far-right media outlets like InfoWars (and, perhaps worth noting, something Russian propaganda networks have been caught actually doing multiple times in Ukraine). In this case, it is an easy if cynical tactic to discredit the voices of victims and undermine the moral weight behind their message....
....And, as our research group, New Media Frontier—which collects and analyzes social media intelligence using a range of custom and commercial analytical tools—recently outlined in an analysis of the #releasethememo campaign, there are many contributing factors to the amplification of American far-right content, including foreign and domestic bots, intentional amplification networks, and other factors. Whether it’s fully automated bot or semi-automated cyborg accounts, automation is a vital part of accelerating the distribution of content on social media.
But in looking at the case of the Parkland, Florida, shooting and the crisis actors narrative it spawned, there was another important factor that allowed it to leap into mainstream consciousness: People outraged by the conspiracy helped to promote it—in some cases far more than the supporters of the story. And algorithms—apparently absent the necessary “sentiment sensitivity” that is needed to tell the context of a piece of content and assess whether it is being shared positively or negatively—see all that noise the same.
https://www.wired.com/story/how-liberals-amped-up-a-parkland-shooting-conspiracy-theory/
This is a good illustration of why caution and discretion are great allies sometimes...
= new reply since forum marked as read
