In the minutes and hours after a 20-year-old repeatedly shot at former president Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, social media platforms, message boards, and encrypted chat groups lit up with conspiracies about the shooting. From wild claims that the incident was a “deep state plot” devised by President Joe Biden […]
For 14 hours over the weekend, Sydney university student Ben Cohen was one of the most reviled men on the internet after he was falsely accused of being the knifeman who went on a stabbing rampage in a Sydney shopping centre, killing six people. The ABC has pieced together how anti-semitic and pro-Kremlin accounts turned […]
Jackson Hinkle has cultivated an online persona so incendiary that he has been kicked off YouTube, Twitch and Instagram. He rages on undaunted, even energized. He produces a regular podcast on Rumble, a website popular with many prominent conservatives. He writes dozens of posts a day on X, where his following has surged to 2.5 […]
On Wednesday, the House passed a bill with large bipartisan support that could potentially result in the popular social media app TikTok being banned from use in the United States. Former President Donald Trump, who has previously supported banning TikTok, seemingly reversed his position on the issue after meeting with a Republican donor invested in […]
We’ve all seen those white streaks trailing behind jets, creating stripes against the blue sky. The lines are called contrails, short for condensation trails, and they appear when water vapor condenses and freezes around the exhaust from an aircraft, according to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. At least that’s what science says. In recent […]
Fear of the deep. It is, at once, a very modern form of horror and a very ancient one. In this case it begins more than six miles high in the sky and ends more than three miles beneath the surface of the ocean. Ten years ago, early in the evening of March 8, 2014, Malaysian […]
"The rothschilds were behind the fed, and they now control the global financial system," says a February 26, 2024 Instagram post with more than 30,000 likes. Text in an image of the late financier on Facebook says: "My name is Jacob Rothschild. My family is worth 500 trillion dollars ... We own your news, the media, your oil and […]
French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is grappling with online attacks targeting him from multiple directions. The DFRLab identified a cryptocurrency scam that impersonated a French newspaper Libération to publish a fraudulent article critical of Attal, which was boosted via Meta ads. It also appears that Russia activated its Doppelganger disinformation operation against Attal, employing suspicious X accounts to amplify […]
The Labour candidate for the 29 February Rochdale byelection, Azhar Ali, has “apologised unreservedly to the Jewish community” for comments which he described as “deeply offensive, ignorant and false.” After comments emerged in which he suggested Israel had allowed the 7 October to happen in order to have a pretext to attack Gaza, he said […]
