A severe storm system moved through the Black Sea this week, impacting occupied Crimea and parts of Ukraine and Russia, leaving millions without heat and power. Amid the storm, pro-Kremlin sources re-circulated an old conspiracy theory suggesting US-based entities were complicit in the storm’s creation. The conspiracy theory accuses the United States of having a technological program that can control the […]
Max Blumenthal, the editor of The Grayzone website, wrote a piece on October 27 that can only be described as a master class in manipulation. His article provided the basis for the now widespread conspiracy theory denying that Hamas murdered hundreds of Israeli civilians. No one who knows Blumenthal or The Grayzone was surprised by […]
Gigi Hadid has come under fire for resharing a video that says Israel has harvested the organs of dead Palestinians. Taking to Instagram, the model reshared the video by user Umme Murtaza (umme_murtazaa). In the clip, Murtaza told followers to "watch this disturbing video, where health officials admitted that Israeli authorities had harvested the organs […]
Climate conspiracy theories are flourishing with lifestyle influencers joining in the misinformation war and scientists hounded on social media, researchers say, as pressure rises on leaders at the COP28 summit. "Mis- and disinformation about the climate emergency are delaying urgently needed action to ensure a liveable future for the planet," the United Nations said in […]
Nigeria announced in late October its plan to introduce the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine into its routine immunisation programme. On October 25, 2023, Abuja-based radio host Ahmed Isah told listeners of his daily "Brekete Family Show" that the government’s cervical cancer vaccination drive may be harmful to young women who are the targets of the […]
Fifty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 59 percent of Americans still believe it was the work of a conspiracy. I was once among them. Back in the early 1970s, as a high school senior and college freshman, I read Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment, Richard Popkin’s The Second Oswald, Penn Jones’ Forgive My Grief, and other […]
As the war between Israel and Hamas has intensified in Gaza, disinformation and conspiracy theories about the conflict have been increasingly circulating on social media. At least that’s what I found in my analysis of some 12,000 comments posted on Telegram channels in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel. Not surprisingly, […]
According to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the threat the Jews pose to the world is closely tied to liberal values. The Jews want to demolish old hierarchies and convince the common people that equality is good, to destroy the aristocracy, to spread democracy, to establish universal human rights, to uphold freedom of […]
A surprising number of young people have recently posted TikTok videos in praise of Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America.” The speakers in these videos, overwhelmingly by people who look too young to even remember 9/11, focus on how bin Laden’s antisemitic pro-terrorism screed opened their eyes to America’s evils. “Under settler colonialism,” one said, “Any kind […]
Social media users recently circulated video footage they claimed shows an Israeli helicopter killing Israelis at an Oct. 7 concert in Israel. Stew Peters, a far-right radio host and the filmmaker behind the anti-COVID-19 vaccine films "Died Suddenly" and "Watch the Water," shared the 14-second video clip on X, formerly Twitter. [...] Read more
