From spreading fear of an impending “World War III” to false narratives linking a clan of the world’s elite to a cyberattack, a flood of online conspiracy theories began Friday after a major computer crash.
Airlines, banks, TV channels and financial institutions were thrown into turmoil after the crash, one of the biggest in recent years that was the result of a faulty software update in an anti-virus program running on Microsoft Windows.
The proliferation of Internet-breaking conspiracy theories on social media platforms — many of which have removed guardrails that once contained the spread of misinformation — illustrates the new normal of information chaos following a major world event.
The outage gave way to a series of unsubstantiated posts on X, Elon Musk’s website, formerly known as Twitter, that spun an apocalyptic narrative: The world has been attacked by a nefarious force.
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“I read somewhere once that ww3 (WW3) would be mostly a cyber war,” wrote one user on X.
The IT crash also sparked an unsubstantiated theory that the World Economic Forum — a magnet for wild lies — had planned a global cyber attack.
To make this theory seem credible, many posts linked to an old WEF video warning of the possibility of a “cyberattack with Covid-like characteristics.”
The video, which is available on the WEF website, warned that the only way to stop the exponential spread of the cyber threat would be to disconnect millions of vulnerable devices from each other and the internet.
“Sad Testament”
The WEF has long been the target of conspiracy theorists who promote the idea of ββa shadowy elite race working for private profit under the guise of solving global issues.
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Conspiratorial posts using the hashtag “cyber polygon,” a reference to a global training event aimed at preparing for possible future attacks, also gained rapid traction online.
“The proliferation of conspiracy theories in the wake of major global events like the outage is a sad testament to the volatile nature of the information ecosystem,” Rafi Mendelson, vice president of disinformation security firm Cyabra, told AFP.
“What’s unique about events like these is how social media platforms, forums and messaging apps facilitate the rapid dissemination of content, allowing theories to quickly gain traction and reach a global audience.”
The trend demonstrates the ability of hoaxes to mutate into viral narratives on tech platforms, which have clamped down on content moderation and reinstated accounts that are known purveyors of misinformation.
During fast-moving news events, confusion often reigns on major tech platforms, with users scrambling to get accurate information in a sea of ββfalse or misleading posts that quickly gain traction.
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“Unpleasant Incentives”
“This raises the biggest issue of fighting disinformation and disinformation,” Michael Moser, executive director of the Global Disinformation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, told AFP.
“The level of trust required to accept information from reliable sources has been lowered to such an extent that people are more willing to believe wild conspiracies that ‘must be true’ rather than actual information being fed to them.”
The global outage, which brought myriad aspects of daily life to a standstill and sent US stocks tumbling, was linked to a bug in an update to an anti-virus program for Windows systems by US cyber security group CrowdStrike.
Assurances by the Austin-based company’s CEO, George Kurtz, that CrowdStrike had presented a solution and was “actively working” to resolve the crisis did little to stem the spread of online conspiracies.
“Combating this misinformation with factual rebuttals is difficult, because the issue is so technical,” Moser said.
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“The explanation that the error was in an improperly configured system file and that a fix is ββin progress may be accurate, but it is not believed by those predisposed to see malicious motives behind failures.”
Source: AFP