It Took Alt-Right Pro-Gun Activists Just Minutes After the Parkland Shooting Began to Start a Campaign of Conspiracies

‘Cauldron of Far-Right Extremist Politics’

Pro-gun activists and users of anonymous chat boards associated with the “alt-right” wasted no time when news broke of the mass shooting on Valentine’s Day in Parkland, Florida. 

“Start looking for [Jewish] numerology and crisis actors,” read one post on 8chan, an anonymous message board that has been associated with the alt-right. That came just 47 minutes after news broke of what would be a massacre leaving 17 people dead.

The Washington Post reports it “studied thousands of anonymous posts about the Parkland attack — and found a conspiracy in the making.”

From 8chan to the also-alt-right associated 4chan, to Reddit, which create “a cauldron of far-right extremist politics,” anonymous posters “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.”

These anonymous posters have created a “legacy” that for years will haunt the student survivors and their families.

“The parents and the families of these murdered children are still being harassed by people online,” said Joan Donovan, a researcher at the think tank Data & Society who studies media ma­nipu­la­tion. “That is the legacy of this kind of harassment. For years to come, these students in Parkland are going to have to suffer this same fate.”

From these anonymous message and chat boards the conspiracy theories and outright lies spread quickly to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who “raised the possibility on his Infowars show that the shooting was a ‘false flag’ attack.” (He reportedly later walked back that claim.)

The Post notes “the ‘false flag’ idea rapidly was gaining popularity online. Within hours, ‘crisis actor’ theories could be found in a surging network of YouTube videos, tweets and forum threads picking apart public information about the students and urging more intense scrutiny.”

One of the Washington Post’s story’s authors tweeted:

Within days the focus on student survivor David Hogg grew in intensity, as the alt-right and other anonymous users focused their efforts in the 17-year old.

“This Dave Hoggs keeps showing up on TV,” a Reddit user wrote. “There’s something wrong with this guy. He needs to be investigated. WE NEED TO DIG!” 

“At this point I think we managed to get into a 1.5 . . . to 2 :1 ratio of information warfare for OUR advantage,” an 8chan user posted, “compared to the jews.”

On Reddit, a post featuring a photo of Hogg “carried a caption suggesting he was smiling because he saw his ‘fellow students get murdered but [he] got famous from it.’ Users of the site registered their approval more than 3,800 times.”

Image by Barry Stock via Flickr and a CC license