“I think this gives them some power,” he said of the people who post his photos, often under accounts intended to appear to belong to the press. “Tweaking someone, offending someone, and saying it’s scary just because they’re insensitive, gives them a sense of belonging.”
But what happens next is an even more insidious danger, Phillips said: the joke is taken at face value by a significant portion of those who are already prepared to distrust the social system.
“It exacerbates all the conspiracy we swirl and sets us on a dangerous course,” she said. “It further corrodes our ability to be based on the same empirical reality.”
Researchers have said that such mischief has a long historical precedent. A man, a comedian, was mistakenly nominated as a gunner in several mass murders, including a shooting in San Bernardino, California in 2015.
Mike Colefield, a research scientist at the University’s Information Disclosure Center, said: Of Washington. “Today, 20 minutes after the event, people are promoting false flag operations and crisis actor theory in a very stereotyped way.”
Colefield described this cycle as “almost factory production, like a clockwork.”
In Jordan’s case, his photo will reappear on social media posts from accounts that imitate the press and copy the logo. Last year, a report of the execution of “Burney” by Taliban soldiers in Kabul was posted on Twitter by @CNNAfghan, a fake account that Twitter suspended, and then by another suspended account, @BBCAfghanNews. It was amplified. death.
“Burney” is also described as the victim of a tornado in 2021 in Kentucky and an explosion in Beirut, Lebanon in 2020. A right-wing journalist killed in Mariupol, “said @RussiaCnn, who has two followers, as a pilot who was shot down while flying to Russia.
