Using the Life Cycle of Media Manipulation, each case study features a chronological description of a media manipulation event, which is filtered along specific variables such as tactics, targets, mitigation, outcomes, and keywords.
In the early hours of Saturday May 23, 2020, graphic photos and videos of executed Egyptian terrorist Hesham Ashmawy were leaked to social media by pro-regime influencers. The timing of the leak appears to have been deliberately synced with the narrative arc of a primetime Ramadan television series, produced and funded by Egypt’s security services. A detailed forensic analysis of the leak suggests the photos and videos were released as part of a coordinated propaganda campaign aimed at the domestic Egyptian audience in order to aggrandize Egypt’s military and scapegoat religious fundamentalism.
In the final two weeks of the 2020 presidential election, Republican operatives spread a recontextualized video of candidate Joe Biden they took out of context from a larger interview and claimed it showed the candidate bragging about running the “biggest voter fraud organization this country has ever seen.” This claim was quickly debunked, but was amplified by influencers and media personalities and adopted by administration officials to muddy the waters about election integrity in furtherance of the voter fraud narrative President Donald Trump and his allies had been seeding in the electorate for a year, and which ultimately led to a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building.
During the active crisis of the Parkland school shooting in February 2018, a photo misidentifying the alleged perpetrator moved from 4chan to the mainstream media when Infowars picked up the image, muddying the waters around the actual shooting. The misidentification led to targeted harassment of the individual in the photograph, who was not associated with the shooting.
Over the course of 3 years, a mix of pranksters and extremists (right wing) launched a butterfly attack campaign as part of a meme war to muddy the waters in an organic Black Twitter hashtag, and utilized digital blackface to amplify memes workshopped on 4chan. Overall, the campaign targeted Black activists and communities online in an effort to sow confusion, discredit authentic support, and suppress voter turnout for the Democratic Party. This campaign was redeployed several times to correspond to cultural trends or breaking news events.
On the afternoon of February 14, 2018, Nikolas Cruz attacked Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 students and teachers. After fleeing the scene, Cruz was apprehended alive by police. Before being officially identified by law enforcement, speculation and false identifications of the shooter circulated online. During this period of confusion, a hoax targeting journalists led to a misidentification, naming Cruz as a member of a small white nationalist militia.
