False-flag conspiracy theories go viral on Twitter after school shooting
The conspiracy theory brigade strikes again.
QAnon conspiracy theorists were quick to declare Thursday’s shooting at Perry High School in Iowa to be a “false flag” event, claiming that the “Deep State” orchestrated the event as a distraction from the release of documents on Wednesday pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein. The claim of a false flag event — a common assertion among conspiracy theorists in the aftermath of mass shootings and other high-profile events — reveals the degree to which reality has been fractured in American society and the consequences with which we must now live. It also provides a window into the conspiratorial world of right-wing ideologues and influencers, who now occupy a role in the information ecosystem devoted to assimilating new information into the alternate reality they’ve sold their followers.
According to law enforcement, one student was killed Thursday morning at Perry High School while at least five others were injured after a student armed with a shotgun and a handgun opened fire in the school. The shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The incident was the second school shooting of 2024 and was one of four mass shootings that have taken place in the first week of the new year.
In other words, Thursday’s school shooting was not an anomaly, but was part of a long-standing pattern of violence in America. But according to QAnon conspiracy theorists, the timing of the shooting — one day after new documents related to Epstein were unsealed — couldn’t have possibly been a coincidence. From their conspiratorial worldview, they saw the whole thing as a nefarious plot carried out by intelligence agencies to deflect attention away from the Epstein documents, despite the fact that the vast majority of the information in the documents was already publicly known.
“Not even 24 hours after the Epstein court document was released we have multiple victims who were shot at Perry High School in Perry, Iowa,” a prominent QAnon influencer wrote in one of the first and most retweeted false-flag posts. “Make no mistake this is a false flag to distract the media from discussing anything in relation to Jeffrey Epstein and his clients.”
Since Twitter no longer practices meaningful content moderation, the false-flag tweets remained online and were at times the top results returned when searching for information about the shooting. Not long after the initial and most influential tweet was posted, the text from that post started to be copied and pasted by a cluster of other accounts, including one account that translated the text into Italian. As I have noted previously, verbatim cross-language posting is often associated with disinformation campaigns. Furthermore, translating disinformation into multiple languages can increase its reach while also making it harder to correct. While there have been efforts to fact-check the initial (English-language) post, these efforts didn’t include translating the fact-check into different languages. Therefore, users who were exposed to a translated version of the initial (false) tweet will likely never see a correction in their own language.
In addition to turning the initial post into copypasta, other accounts also weighed in with variations of the conspiracy theory, all revolving around the idea that the timing of the school shooting couldn’t possibly have been coincidental.
“Oh here we go another false flag to distract from the Epstein list [and] the fact that Trump is now exonerated,” one user wrote, while another suggested that “the MK ultra program pushed out a mass shooter to cover up the epstein reporting.”
Others went a step further, accusing the so-called “Deep State” of actually murdering children: “Deep State just killed a bunch of children at a High School in Iowa,” one tweet said. “We warned you a false flag was on the horizon after the Epstein documents.”
The documents they were referring to were recently unsealed after initially being filed as part of a 2015 defamation suit against Epstein’s co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell. The most talked-about information contained in them is a list of approximately 100 people connected to Epstein, but most of their names (and their relationship to Epstein) had been previously reported, and the vast majority aren’t actually accused of any wrongdoing.
Even prior to the release of the documents, right-wing conspiracy theorists and influencers were already hard at work overhyping the content that would be revealed, claiming that a slew of Democratic politicians — including Bill Clinton — and prominent liberal academics, entrepreneurs, and entertainers would be exposed as members of a supposed global child sex trafficking cabal catering to the most elite members of society. There were also fake documents circulating on Twitter Wednesday that were being misrepresented as the actual documents in what appeared to be a disinformation campaign targeting specific celebrities, including Jimmy Kimmel.
In reality, while there certainly is a scandal involving Epstein and some of his associates, the release of documents on Wednesday was a relatively benign event that did not reveal much new or salacious information. There would be little reason to stage a false flag event to distract from such a nothingburger, yet, according to conspiracy theorists on Twitter, the deep state murdered children in order to cover up information that was already publicly known.
And that’s just the thing about conspiracy theories — they don’t have to actually make sense logically. They just have to feel like they are true, or even just that they could be true. This is how conspiracy theorists manipulate people: by preying on cognitive biases and making vague associations that invoke a feeling of suspiciousness even if the facts don’t suggest that there is anything to be suspicious about.
“…conspiracy theorists are exploiting mental shortcuts that our brains use to process information — essentially hijacking these processes to make us more susceptible to falsehoods.”
To make a conspiracy theory stick, one need not create a cohesive narrative, and certainly not a fact-based storyline. All one needs to do is create that feeling of suspiciousness. By taking advantage of cognitive vulnerabilities, such as those that make us susceptible to believing information when we hear it repeatedly and from multiple sources — regardless of the veracity of the information — conspiracy theorists can create impressions in our mind that we may not even be entirely conscious of, but which influence how we perceive future information. Furthermore, by copying and pasting the same narrative and posting it from different accounts, conspiracy theorists are exploiting mental shortcuts that our brains use to process information — essentially hijacking these processes to make us more susceptible to falsehoods. Research shows that seeing the same or similar message from different sources boosts its credibility and makes people more likely to believe the message, especially if the sources are familiar to the recipient. This is because people tend to assume that information from multiple sources is grounded in different perspectives and is thus worth reading and taking seriously. Credibility is also influenced by norms and other social processes, such that people are more likely to perceive a source as credible if they see that others (especially others within the same social network) perceive the source as credible. Hence, seeing the false flag conspiracy theory coming from a variety of accounts within the same right-wing networks makes people within those networks see the information as more credible and believable.
Of course, those who manufacture conspiracy theories like this are often well aware of what they’re doing. But in some ways, they have no choice at this point. They’ve sold their followers an alternate reality in which their political opponents are the epitome of evil and their political allies are righteous avengers, and now they have to maintain that reality, or else be exposed as frauds. They spent days working people into a frenzy over the upcoming release of the Epstein documents, and they had to find a way to make the reality live up to the hype.
By concocting these accusations of a false flag event, conspiracy theorists are creating a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy regarding the content of the documents. After all, if the government would go to such extreme lengths to cover up the Epstein documents, then that would inherently imply that there is something important within them that needs to be covered up. In other words, by manufacturing a false flag accusation, conspiracy theorists are creating “evidence” that they can later use and present as support for their initial conspiracy theory. This claim will also be incorporated into the regressive logic underlying conspiracy theories, which allows conspiracy theorists to point to a lack of evidence as “proof” that the conspiracy is real. So, when little or nothing comes out of the recently released documents, conspiracy theorists can point to the false flag event that they manufactured, and say that it was responsible for obstructing efforts to uncover new information in the documents, and that that is why nothing big came out of it. See how that works?
This is the life of a conspiracy theorist. Every time new information comes out, they must spin a new tale to account for it — even if that means turning actual children actually getting shot with actual bullets into nothing more than the conspiracy narrative of the day. That’s the price of conspiracy theories.
Well, that, plus your integrity.
Indeed, we Americans DO labor under a conspiracy and it is one that I have come to detest with my entire being. When Al Gore advocated for the INTERNET I doubt he anticipated the pedestrian and purient depths that service could fall to. Rather than assist in improving the quality of my life, I am only assailed by increasing amount of marketing, dis-information, mis-information and sensationalism leaving me to shovel through the offal looking for the occasional pony. My time on the INTERNET is now spent seeking out "bandaids (see: "Weaponized", "Ryan McBeth") in the hopes of securing a counter-balance to RUSSIA TODAY schemes and Q-anon ignorance.
That the release of the Epstein Record reveals ANYTHING in its heavily redacted pages affirms to me that this sensationalism is driven more by the advocates for the legal action......Palm Beach Media.......than any supposed search for Truth. IMHO I suspect that the individuals representing themselves as conspiracy theorists are most probably shills for the Media seeking to build subscriptions.
FWIW.