the Conspirasphere

NOEL ROONEY notes that the recent terror attacks in London and Manchester provoked a familiar – and disturbingly swift – response from the Conspirasphere...

rapid response

The UK has, in recent times, become a principal target for terrorism; the attacks in London and Manchester have brought death, injury and mass panic, and my heart goes out to those whose lives have been lost or ruined. The attacks themselves, it transpires, are also targets: targets for the false flag meme that has become the standard Conspirasphere response to incidents of this kind.

A recently published research paper from the University of Washington has some interesting things to say about this response pattern. Kate Starbird and her team investigate the ‘alternative media ecosystem’ using domain network mapping (based on Twitter responses) in an attempt to understand the ultimate provenance, as well as the web of connections between, the false flag/crisis actor/hoax memes generated in the wake of terror attacks. The findings of the research paint an intriguing picture: denizens of the Conspirasphere appear to be waiting for these events; the response is pretty immediate (regularly within an hour of the news breaking); and there are some groups and websites that play an active part in galvanising other ‘citizen journalists’ and ‘researchers’ into scrutinising the media for inconsistencies. Starbird’s research identifies a few websites that use Twitter bots to disseminate ‘hoax’ responses into the fervid post-attack æther: the online service industry known as ‘just putting it out there’.

Inconsistencies are easy to find, of course; in the immediate aftermath of an attack, the mainstream media are often as confused and panicked as the eyewitnesses they seek out. For instance, after the London Bridge attack, a stabbing incident in Vauxhall, actually unrelated and criminal rather than terrorist, was part of the storyline for several hours. Eyewitnesses regularly make inaccurate claims about the number of perpetrators, and grow the story into a legendary vehicle; it is often 12 hours or more before a relatively coherent picture emerges, one that relies more on the facts than the exaggerated responses of terrified onlookers.

It is on this confusion of legends that the conspiracy theorists feed. That, and a weirdly naïve faith in the veracity of photographic records, or hastily shot smartphone videos of poor quality; from these essentially legendary resources, the alternative narrative is born. A tangential resemblance between faces in blurred images is grist for the ‘crisis actor’ meme; out of context images of bloodstains, or the lack of them, spark hoax theories; then, in the aftermath, hazy stories about security services being (at some ill-defined point) aware of the activities of the perpetrators generates false flag certainties.

In an ill-starred occurrence of propinquity, I read the Starbird paper less than an hour before news of the Manchester bombing came through. I decided to wait for two hours and then check if any false flag videos or articles (as opposed to simple tweets) had appeared online; I wagered that some pioneers would be capable of getting stuff out by then. In the event, two hours was way too slow an estimate on my part; within an hour, there were YouTube videos on the atrocity. It struck me, as I dredged the Internet for examples, that the responses are actually of two distinct types: first, the knee-jerk mantras of the automatic dissidents; second, and more subtly, the teasers – posts that don’t explicitly say ‘false flag’ but pose questions designed to elicit such a response. These teasers are the catalysts of the Conspirasphere; they provoke scrutiny of haphazard, legendary material for evidence to fit the alternative narrative and provide the virtual scaffolding on which the edifices of contemporary conspiracy theory are often built.