Conspiracy bingo’: Transatlantic extremists seize
on the pandemic
The virus and its economic trauma are helping US and
European white supremacists, immigration foes and other far-right activists
organize and spread their messages online.
By MARK
SCOTT AND STEVEN OVERLY 5/12/20, 4:00 PM CET Updated 5/13/20, 5:21 AM CET
Conspiracy theories have flourished online during the
coronavirus pandemic
The coronavirus is providing a global rallying cry for
conspiracy theorists and far-right extremists on both sides of the Atlantic.
People
seizing on the pandemic range from white supremacists and anti-vaxxers in the
U.S. to fascist and anti-refugee groups across Europe, according to a POLITICO
review of thousands of social media posts and interviews with misinformation
experts tracking their online activities. They also include far-right populists
on both continents who had previously tried to coordinate their efforts after
the 2016 American presidential election.
Not all
online groups peddling messages on the pandemic have links to the far right,
but those extremists have become especially vocal in using the outbreak to push
their political agenda at a time of deepening public uncertainty and economic
trauma. They are piggybacking on social media to promote virus-related themes drawn
from multiple sources — among them, Russian and Chinese disinformation
campaigns, the Trump administration’s musings about the virus’ origins and
anti-Muslim themes from India’s nationalist ruling party.
“Honestly,
it’s a dream come true for any and every hate group, snake-oil salesman and
everything in between,” said Tijana Cvjetićanin, a fact-checker in the Balkans
who has watched ultranationalist groups promoting hate-filled messages on
social media about COVID-19, often against Jewish communities.
Civil
rights advocates have warned for months that the virus could aid recruiting for
the most extreme white-supremacist and neo-Nazi groups — those actively rooting
for society’s collapse. Some online researchers say they also worry about the
barrage of false messages from extremist groups feeding what the United Nations
has dubbed an “infodemic” that makes it hard to separate fact from fiction.
Twitter
announced Monday that it would begin more aggressively labeling tweets that
contain misleading or harmful coronavirus information.
Opponents
of government lockdown orders have used online platforms to organize protests
across the U.S., including rallies where activists displayed guns inside
Michigan’s state capitol. In Europe, rumors linking the virus to 5G wireless
technology have led to dozens of arson attacks on telecommunications masts — a
phenomenon that now appears to have spread to Canada.
“It's like
hitting conspiracy bingo,” said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic
Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, which is tracking COVID-19
misinformation.
From 4chan
to Facebook
As the
world economy craters and the virus’ global death toll ticked past 280,000
people as of May 11, extremist messages are finding fertile ground on fringe
online platforms like 4chan, Telegram and a gamer hangout called Discord. From
there, such harmful content can make its way to mainstream sites like Facebook
and Google-owned YouTube — each boasting roughly 2 billion users apiece —
despite the companies’ attempts to weed out violent or dangerous content.
Facebook
said last week that one collection of fake accounts and pages it removed in
April — tied to two anti-immigrant websites in the U.S. — had drawn more than
200,000 followers with messages including the hashtag “#ChinaVirus” and a false
claim that COVID-19 mainly kills white people. Twitter announced Monday that it
would begin more aggressively labeling tweets that contain misleading or
harmful coronavirus information.
But plenty
of other fake virus content continues to thrive online. That includes a slickly
produced online video, called “Plandemic,” that garnered millions of views
across YouTube, Twitter and Facebook over the weekend by promoting bogus
medical cures and other conspiracy theories tied to COVID-19. The video remains
in wide circulation.
One
COVID-related term, “Coronachan,” has also exploded on social media, first
emerging in January and drawing more than 120,000 shares on Twitter in one week
in late April, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a
London-based think tank that tracks extremist groups. (The term is a play on
the name of 4chan, a message board that is a favorite gathering spot for the
global far right.) In Germany, Telegram groups where influential extremists and
far-right activists attack vulnerable groups have doubled their number of
followers to more than 100,000 participants since February, according to a
review by POLITICO of those accounts.
The themes
of far-right posts include long-standing grievances, such as allegations that
migrants spread disease, support for President Donald Trump’s proposed border
wall, antagonism toward the European Union or opposition to gun control. One
fake online rumor, accusing Microsoft founder Bill Gates of creating the virus,
echoes centuries-old conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes about global
elites pulling the world’s strings.
“These
aren’t new lines they are spinning,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the
Center for Countering Digital Hate. “They will use anything they can, whether
it’s coronavirus or something else, to bring people into their radical world.”
Public
figures helping stoke the fires include French nationalist leader Marine Le
Pen, whose Facebook account has more than 1.5 million followers, and Trump, who
has defended his use of the term “Chinese virus” and pushed the theory that the
disease may have come from a lab in China, despite pushback from his
intelligence and defense agencies.
Extremist
groups on the two continents have tried before to coordinate their messaging,
with middling success.
After
Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, far-right online communities sprouted across
the U.S. and Europe, at first using online platforms like Facebook and Google
before shifting their focus to smaller, less-regulated networks to share
conspiracy theories or organize protests.
Americans
like Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist, also tried to
export U.S.-style online tactics across the Atlantic in hopes of uniting
European right-wing groups like Italy’s League party and Le Pen’s National
Rally in France, though, as POLITICO reported last year, he struggled to win
over movements on the Continent.
Now, as the
virus gives the far right a new impetus to find audiences, many European
activists are wielding the same U.S.-style tactics they have spent years
learning to emulate, including the creation of online “meme banks” of photos
designed to spread widely. That leaves them less in need of outside help,
according to researchers tracking their movements.
“Europe’s
far right no longer needs additional resources from its transatlantic
supporters,” said Chloe Colliver, who heads the digital research unit at the
Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
Blaming
minorities
It does not
take much digging through the online platforms to find far-right messages on
the health crisis.
In Italy,
extremist news outlets have flooded social media with reports blaming that
country’s devastating coronavirus outbreak on migrants, including an online
attack that singled out a Pakistani employee at a Chinese restaurant in a
northern Italian town.
In France,
activists called for sending non-white populations back to their “home”
countries, while Le Pen, the far-right leader, alleged on Facebook that mosques
had have “taken advantage of the confinement orders” by blaring “the muezzin's
call to Islamic prayer” on loudspeakers.
Tommy
Robinson, the British anti-immigration activist, has promoted the
"#GermJihad" hashtag and reposted online messages from members of
India’s ruling nationalist BJP party to his more than 36,000 followers on
Telegram, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s review of his
posts.
Others, on
sites like Facebook and Reddit, have alleged that the Chinese created the virus
as a bioweapon to attack the U.S. economy, and will reap the windfall if they
are not stopped. “China will become even more brazen and take down western
economies with more filth in the future,” one Reddit user wrote.
Those
claims go much further than the recent speculation by Trump and Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo that the virus originated in a government lab in Wuhan, China.
(The president said this month that he thinks the Chinese “made a horrible
mistake and they didn’t want to admit it.”)
While some
online far-right users have jumped on Trump’s messages, others had already been
promoting anti-China rhetoric before senior U.S. politicians began railing on
Beijing, according to a review of social media posts from early February.
Attacking
governments
Extremists
are also using the virus to call for resistance against their governments.
In Telegram
channels with tens of thousands of followers, users, mostly in the U.S., urged
people to take up arms to protest the lockdowns and protect their civil
liberties, sometimes posting photos of themselves dressed in biohazard suits
and carrying automatic weapons, according to research from the Institute for
Strategic Dialogue.
European
far-right groups also have called for national governments to reclaim their
power from the EU — a message primarily focused on countries like Greece, Spain
and Italy, where some people remain bitter about how the bloc treated them
during the 2008 financial crisis. Those countries similarly have seen a spike
in Russian disinformation campaigns, mostly through Kremlin-backed media
outlets, aimed at sowing doubt about Europe’s response to the virus, according
to a recent review conducted by EU disinformation officials, obtained by
POLITICO.
A far more
extreme incident occurred in the U.S. in March, when the FBI shot and killed a
Missouri man who agents said had been plotting to blow up a hospital to call
attention to his white supremacist beliefs. The man, who had posted
anti-Semitic remarks on Telegram hours before being killed, had chosen the
target because of "media attention on the health sector" during the
pandemic, the bureau said in a statement quoted by NBC News.
Misinformation
experts at the Oxford Internet Institute documented Facebook groups across 33
states aimed at instigating opposition to quarantine measures that rob people
of their freedoms and ability to earn a living, according to Aliaksandr
Herasimenka, a postdoctoral researcher. Some had fewer than 10,000 members,
while others had grown much larger.
“The
similarity and design of their Facebook groups suggests that many of these
protests across individual states are related to each other,” said Herasimenka.
It “might be directed, not necessarily managed, but directed or inspired by
some centralized lobby groups that we don't know exactly what they are.”
Facebook
has removed some of the protests from its network after determining they had
violated state orders by encouraging people to take actions that could spread
the virus. But the policy hasn’t applied consistently across the social
network, and Facebook has been adamant that it is not policing people’s
political opinions. The company has often left it to a global network of
independent fact-checkers to debunk the worst online offenders or counter
misinformation by pointing people to credible sources.
Several of
the recently created U.S. Facebook groups have been spearheaded by the Dorr
family, brothers who manage a series of aggressively U.S. pro-gun
organizations, the Washington Post reported last month. One Dorr-connected
private group called Wisconsinites Against Excessive Quarantine attracted
118,000 members; its Pennsylvania affiliate counts 89,000, according to a
review of these Facebook groups. The Dorrs did not respond to requests for
comment through their advocacy organizations.
“The
audience for this stuff isn't the average American news consumer and I'm not
even sure the audience is the average person stuck at home sheltering in
place,” said Philip Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute. “It’s
people who are reluctant to take any advice or instructions from the government
at any time, whether it's about guidelines on what kinds of guns you can have
or whether it's health-related instructions to stay at home.”
‘There’s
only one conversation’
The
anti-vaccine movement on both continents has also latched onto the pandemic.
Media
Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog, found posts within U.S. Facebook
groups claiming the pandemic is an effort to force people into accepting
vaccines, and perhaps even a surreptitious plot to inject people with
microchips. Similar messages appeared in WhatsApp messages shared widely in
Italy, which has a long-standing anti-vaxxer community, while groups in France
have called for a boycott of any government-backed COVID-19 vaccine program.
“Diseases
have long been used to promote disinformation” — Ben Nimmo, director of
investigations at Graphika
U.S.
anti-vaccine groups also organized an anti-lockdown rally this month outside
California’s state capitol and have taken part in protests in New York,
Colorado and Texas, using their opposition to state-ordered shutdowns as part
of a broader message about personal “freedom,” the New York Times reported.
Other
COVID-19 themes emerging online include long-running conspiracy theories
blaming the “global elites” for much of the world’s ills, particularly focusing
on George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire who has long been a target for
right-wing and anti-Semitic groups.
Since late
January, attacks against Soros and his fellow billionaire Gates have shifted to
accusing the men of either spreading the virus or capitalizing on it to push a
pro-vaccine agenda. Some Facebook users in private online groups seen by
POLITICO also questioned whether Gates is also Jewish. Gates, who has made
global public health a priority of his philanthropic efforts, has drawn their
attention because of a 2015 video in which he discussed the dangers of a future
global pandemic.
“Diseases
have long been used to promote disinformation,” said Ben Nimmo, director of
investigations at Graphika, the social media analysis firm, who has tracked the
spread of COVID-19 extremist content.
“But right
now, there’s only one conversation that everyone is having, and that’s about
the coronavirus,” he added. “The disinformation actors know that as well, and
they are trying to take advantage.”
Cristiano Lima contributed reporting
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