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.
During the Oregon wildfires of September 2020, rumors spread locally and nationally that left wing activists had intentionally set the fires based on a series of misidentifications and inference by public officials. The rumor was amplified from partisan influencers on the far right, fake antifa Twitter accounts, anonymous trolling communities on 4chan, the QAnon conspiracy network, and late stage attention from President Trump.
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.
Throughout 2017, pranksters and extremists utilized parody accounts to discredit the antifascist movement in the US. These butterfly attacks used keyword squatting to capture attention during breaking news events, and tacticallyadjusted over the course of the year. This case study outlines the origin of butterfly attacks that continue to the present day, with news events like #AntifaFires being a prime recent example of a disinformation campaign made possible by the media manipulation campaign outlined here.
“Endless Mayfly” was an operation that created inauthentic websites spoofing established media outlets and online personas to spread false and inflammatory content targeting Saudi Arabia, the US, and Israel from at least April 2016 to November 2018. The operation astroturfed a false grassroots organization purporting to advocate against Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism, and seeded related false content to activists and journalists, which in some instances was traded up the chain to the mainstream media.
