A guest post from long-time EoZ reader L. King:
Here are some interesting research results from University of Washington assistant Professor Kate Starbird on the propagation of fake news memes. Starbird noticed a disturbing trend in the use of conspiracy theory terms such as “false flag” and “crisis actors” staring with the 2013 Boston marathon bombing in social media, but only began researching it seriously in 2016. She and her students traced some 58 million Twitter comments using such terms and found that large numbers of them referenced the same alt-left and alt-right sources; she noted 81 of the most frequently recurring. Some of these such as Global Rresearch, Veterans Today, BeforeItsNews, Infowar, RT, Sputnik News and PressTV will be familiar to readers – she catalogs the last 3 three as foreign news services though she recognizes them as propaganda outlets. Canadian antisemite and Holocaust denier Jim Fetzer does show up on her list. Surprisingly Al-Jazeera does not. While antisemitism was not the focus of the study she mentions it as a significant factor in the sample.
In the pictured diagram the alt media that promotes these conspiracies are in blue, mainstream media that deny them in red and sites used to confirm conspiracies are shown in green, the thickness of the links denotes the frequency in which these sources reference each other, the size of the bubble indicates frequency of use. That Alex Jones’ heavily referenced Infowars stands largely apart seems significant but since I haven’t had cause to follow it I don’t feel that qualified to comment. It is a conspiracy site, but I haven’t noticed myself that it comes up in anti-Semitic/antizionist discourse.
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