crisis actor

18 results back to index

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

His name is James Tracy. “He’s not convinced the parents whose children were killed are really who they say they are,” Cooper said. “Tracy even cites a company called ‘Crisis Actors’ that provides actors to use in safety drills and the like. Apparently, that is supposed to bolster his case.”[5] Internet searches for “crisisactors.org” surged after Cooper’s broadcast, aided by Infowars, which jumped on Tracy’s reference to the website. The term “crisis actors” first surfaced in 1977, used in a report by Michael Brecher, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, to describe nations in conflict.[6] It gained its current meaning after the Aurora theater shooting in 2012, when Visionbox, an actors’ studio in Denver, set up crisisactors.org to promote its services as participants in active-shooter drills, to lend realism to the event and improve the emergency response.

…

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Anderson Cooper, Anderson Cooper 360, transcript, CNN, January 11, 2013, https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/acd/date/2013-01-11/segment/01. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 Ben Zimmer, “Plots, Politics and the Meaning of ‘Crisis Actors,’ ” Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2018, Life & Work, https://www.wsj.com/articles/plots-politics-and-the-meaning-of-crisis-actors-1520008999. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 Jeffrey S. Morton, Patricia Kollander, and Thomas Wilson, “Letters: Why James Tracy, FAU’s Conspiracy Theorist, Should Resign,” Palm Beach Post, April 29, 2013, https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/fl-xpm-2013-04-28-fl-online-letter1-20130428-story.html.

…

Lenny Pozner, who lived near Pulse nightclub in 2016, noticed false flag conspiracies spreading online before the gunman who killed forty-nine had even left the premises. In Las Vegas, survivors still in their hospital beds after the 2017 shooting there that killed fifty-eight got onto their phones or laptops to report that they were alive, and found vicious attacks from people calling them “crisis actors.” In a now-familiar pattern, Sandy Hook conspiracies surfaced in isolated message boards and groups, then caught fire across social media, their spread fueled by algorithms that select what users see based on their past preferences and choices. John Kelly is a network sociologist and a pioneer in mapping online communities.

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

3D printing, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Columbine, crisis actor, gun show loophole, impulse control, Lyft, megaproject, side project, Skype, Snapchat, uber lyft

They scoffed at the explanation: the Hoggs moved to Parkland from Torrance, California, in 2014, and David returned to spend most summers with his friend there. Sometimes, they went to the beach. The conspiracy sites howled. Crisis actor, obviously. Marco Rubio actually tweeted in support of the kids Tuesday evening, labeling the charges “the work of a disgusting group of idiots with no sense of decency.” “Thank you,” David tweeted back. His friends responded with humor. Wolf Blitzer asked Cameron about the crisis actor charges live on CNN. “Well, if you had seen me in our school’s production of Fiddler on the Roof, you would know that nobody would pay me to act, for anything,” Cameron said.

…

“These inspiring young people remind me of the Freedom Riders of the 60s who also said we’ve had ENOUGH and our voices will be heard,” it said. The two-million-dollar celebrity windfall came with a price. Conservative critics took it as confirmation the kids were pawns—and added Decadent Hollywood to the list of puppet masters. “Crisis actor” charges leapt from right-wing websites to mainstream media. A growing conspiracy theory contended that school shootings were hoaxes cooked up by the Liberal Media as a pretext for a government gun-grab. It escalated when The Internet discovered that David Hogg had been photographed thousands of miles away in summer 2017.

…

“These politicians have shown that they want to be on the wrong side of history and that’s absolutely fine—we’ll be sure to smear them in our history textbooks that we write, and that will be their legacy and how they will be forever remembered, as the cowards that many of them are—that want to take money from special interest groups instead of putting their constituents’ lives in front of their political agenda.” He peppered random answers with allusions to his Twitter accusers, spitting out terms like “libtards,” “Nazis,” and “crisis actors.” The digs were getting to him. He was angry at the system rigged against young black boys, repeatedly decrying the “school-to-prison pipeline.” That was a signature phrase of the Peace Warriors, and while David had missed the meeting at Emma’s house, the concept quickly permeated the group. David kept saying he was an angry person and a nihilist.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

This situation unfortunately repeated itself in February 2018, when a student opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing seventeen people.124 The tragedy turned a number of the Parkland students into high-profile advocates for stronger gun safety laws. In turn, some pro-gun advocates and fringe websites began claiming that these traumatized young people weren’t high school students at all but rather “crisis actors” who traveled around the country impersonating victims to generate sympathy and accelerate gun control.125 Once again, because authoritative sources had not yet debunked these conspiracy theories in the early days of their spread, users googling “Parkland” and “crisis actors” were seeing articles that were relevant, recent, and utterly absurd. The Russians, of course, were only too happy to exploit the confusion. Hamilton 68—an Alliance for Securing Democracy project that tracks Russian influence—identified a surge of bot activity pushing hashtags like “#guncontrolnow and alleging that the shooter was either a White supremacist or an anti-fascist.126 Firehosing is not just an inconvenience; in the twenty-first century, firehosing is tantamount to censorship by other means.

…

Yet in the years since, the Internet has become a double-edged sword. Social media has given the student activists produced by the 2018 Parkland shooting the megaphone that comes with several million Twitter followers. Those same platforms also spread the false news stories that those students are “crisis actors” paid by George Soros to advance gun control.21 The Internet has accelerated what researchers at RAND have termed “truth decay.”22 Cyberspace has become a world where no idea is too conspiratorial to be true, where the click of a mouse sends outlandish opinions circulating instantaneously and widely, where our beliefs are reinforced by like-minded people and clever algorithms.

Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

Edgar Maddison Welch, affidavit filed December 12, 2016, in US District Court for the District of Columbia, https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/ uploads/2017/03/pizzagate-affidavit.pdf. “in our own backyard” Merlan, Republic of Lies, 60. actor of the same name Nathan Francis, “Edgar Maddison Welch PizzaGate Theory: Was the Comet Ping Pong Shooter a Crisis Actor? New Conspiracy Theory Takes Hold [Debunked],” Inquisitr, December 6, 2016, https://www .inquisitr.com/3772621/edgar-maddison-welch-pizzagate-theory-was-the-cometping-pong-shooter-a-crisis-actor-new-conspiracy-theory-takes-hold-debunked/. “wasn’t 100 percent” Adam Goldman, “The Comet Ping Pong Gunman Answers Our Reporter’s Questions, New York Times, December 7, 2016, https:// www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/us/edgar-welch-comet-pizza-fake-news.html.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

About U.S. troops sent to build field hospitals in West Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak (not an attempt to stop the disease’s spread, but a plot to bring it to the United States to justify “mass lockdowns” at home). About ISIS beheadings of U.S. and British captives (possibly not real murders, but staged covert ops by the U.S. government starring crisis actors). About the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, on allegations that he sexually assaulted a housekeeper in a New York City hotel room (the charges were eventually dropped and a civil suit settled but Wolf wondered if the whole thing had been an “intelligence service” operation designed to take Strauss-Kahn out of the running in French elections where he had been “the odds-on favorite to defeat Nicolas Sarkozy”).

…

* * * This flurry of activity by Other Naomi during the Covid era meant that the stakes of getting confused with her had become significantly higher than they were in that restroom in Manhattan. Her earlier forays into unfounded conspiracies were frequently offensive and no doubt hurtful to those who she hinted were spies or crisis actors. But they never put large numbers of people into active danger. With Covid, that changed. And when it came to the notorious “vaccine shedding” fiction, it was easy to see why she was getting so much traction. The claim that vaccinated people could somehow infect unvaccinated people with dangerous particles started circulating at a crucial moment in the pandemic when many were deciding whether or not they were going to trust the shots.

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality by Laurence Scott

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, colonial rule, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, deepfake, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, Internet of things, Joan Didion, job automation, Jon Ronson, late capitalism, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, Neil Armstrong, post-truth, Productivity paradox, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, SoftBank, technological determinism, TED Talk, Y2K, you are the product

The amplifying quality of social media means that there is a new responsibility in expressing your position. To take an extreme example, in the days following the Parkland School shooting in Florida, which killed seventeen people, the number-one trending YouTube video was a clip arguing that the students speaking out in anguish for gun control were hired ‘crisis actors’, in the pocket of CNN. What began as a video posted twice to Facebook quickly received hundreds of thousands of views. These deliberate acts of misinformation need to be seen for the smallness of their origins rather than the enormity of their impact. They must, in Smith’s words, be dismantled, destroyed, ignored.

Radicalized by Cory Doctorow

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, G4S, high net worth, information asymmetry, Kim Stanley Robinson, license plate recognition, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, old-boy network, public intellectual, satellite internet, six sigma, Social Justice Warrior, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit

There had always been low-key conspiracy theories about the Eagle, going back centuries: he was a demon summoned by Freemasons to subjugate America; he was a secret laboratory experiment gone horribly wrong (or, sometimes, exactly right); he was a special effect created by hologram projectors or AI-based video-doctoring algorithms, and the people who claimed to have seen him were hypnotized, or crisis actors, or special effects themselves. Then Bruce asked to see him and brought along a small, air-gapped tablet on which he’d stored PDFs of the Intellipedia entries about the Eagle, along with their edit histories, as NSA analysts and private-sector contractors from Booz Allen and Palantir and S.A.I.C. debated their own conspiracy theories about his use as a secret Chinese (or European, or Russian, or private-sector crime syndicate) asset, and what someone might have offered him or threatened him with in order to turn him.

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

In July 2018, for example, the head of Facebook’s News Feed, John Hegeman, was asked by CNN to explain why Alex Jones’s Infowars site was hosted. If Facebook was dedicated to eradicating fake news, why did it tolerate a site that disseminated nonsense rumours that the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre were ‘crisis actors’? Hegeman insisted that Facebook was simply a place ‘where different people can have a voice’. The baser truth is that Facebook profited from allowing advertisers to target people who liked the Infowars page.27 Facebook ultimately caved, only after Spotify and iTunes banned Infowars the following month.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

Trolls sometimes plant misleading or inaccurate information into credible sources, such as think tanks or local media, which are then frequently quoted by journalists. For example, less than an hour after the Parkland high-school shooting occurred in February 2018, far-right trolls made plans to hijack the public narrative. ‘Start looking for [Jewish] numerology and crisis actors,’ one wrote on the image board 8chan. This disinformation and obfuscation technique is called ‘source hacking’.45 In December 2018, Der Spiegel revealed that one of their award-winning journalists, Claas Relotius, had freely invented major parts of his stories, including quotes, places, scenes, even entire characters.46 This scandal gave far-right actors such as Martin Sellner across Europe ammunition to paint all journalists as dishonest and unprofessional.47 One month later, in January 2019, members of Generation Identity launched a nationwide campaign against journalists, attaching posters on the façades of media outlets across the country and attacking a journalist of the newspaper TAZ in Berlin.48 A similar wave of scepticism towards scientific studies took root when three scholars published a series of hoax papers called ‘Grievance Studies’ with the aim of exposing flaws in the academic review processes of journals in 2017 and 2018.

Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias by Kevin Cook

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, crisis actor, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, friendly fire, index card, Jones Act, no-fly zone, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Peoples Temple, QAnon, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, wikimedia commons

ALEX JONES built InfoWars into an empire worth well over $100 million by claiming that events ranging from Waco in 1993 to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center, the 2012 shootings of twenty children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol, which he supported, were “inside jobs,” false-flag operations. In April 2022, after losing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Sandy Hook parents, whom Jones called “crisis actors” conspiring in “a hoax,” InfoWars filed for bankruptcy. The INCIDENT AT WACO remains the deadliest action by federal forces on American soil since the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. In 2007 the Native American activist, actor, and musician Russell Means released a song called “Waco, the White Man’s Wounded Knee.”

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

‘Sorry to interrupt: I know you’re very busy right now trying to convince yourselves, and the rest of us, that your hero couldn’t possibly have used chemical weapons to kill up to 70 people in rebel-held Douma on April 7. Maybe Robert Fisk’s mysterious doctor has it right – and maybe the hundreds of survivors and eyewitnesses to the attack are all “crisis actors.”’ To add to the confusion, others rushed to defend Fisk, including the anti-corporatist ‘media criticism’ website Media Lens, whose exoneration began: ‘UK corporate media are under a curious kind of military occupation.’ The reader was invited to believe that Fisk’s critics were largely stooges who were influenced, if not controlled, by British intelligence.

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon tax, Climategate, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crisis actor, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, fake news, false flag, green new deal, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Shellenberger, obamacare, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, selection bias, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steven Levy, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks

Just like what happened at the Parkland shooting. My blood pressure jumped. My wife and I have a very good friend whose sister lost a child in the massacre at Sandy Hook. If I got angry, this dinner really would be over. But how could I let him get away with this hogwash? He began to talk about how the Parkland kids were “crisis actors.” That the mom of one of the “victims” said, “I don’t want thoughts and prayers, I want gun control,” which made him a little suspicious. He said, “Isn’t that exactly what the anti-gun lobby wanted her to say?” At that point our conversation devolved into a long back-and-forth over conspiracy theories and burden of proof, Occam’s Razor, and why I had such a big problem with the idea that you could count speculations and suspicions as evidence.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

He usually leaves a manifesto in their car or at their home because they get killed or “suicided” at the end of the attack so that they can never speak about the incident.196 • The physical evidence from the crime scene gets lost, contaminated, or even intentionally destroyed, and the surveillance cameras either malfunction or the footage is confiscated and labeled “Classified” by the FBI.197 • Most eyewitness video evidence is either grainy, out of focus, or non-existent, and the good quality footage either gets confiscated by the FBI, or the person’s cell phone memory gets wiped on “national security” grounds. • Independent eyewitnesses gave conflicting accounts about what actually happened at the event, but those eyewitnesses that were interviewed on the corporate news give unrealistic and overly-detailed descriptions of what they claim to have witnessed. • Alleged victims are discovered to be crisis actors that appear in multiple events, promoting faked or staged cell phone footage to further push the intended account of events or to authenticate the story.198 • Families of victims show odd behavior, no emotion, fake crying, or even laughter during interviews. This is known as “duping delight” and it is a clear and obvious indicator of deception.199 • The families of the victims either have acting backgrounds or ties to government agencies, and the “victims” receive millions in federal payoffs or charity proceeds

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

After the mass shooting in Las Vegas in October 2017, some YouTubers filled the data void with crackpot theories about “false flags” signaling that the massacre was staged. That happened again after a November shooting in Texas. Then again in February, when a gunman killed seventeen at a high school in Parkland, Florida. On the internet fringes, theories arose that student survivors from that tragedy, outspoken in their gun reform support, were paid “crisis actors.” YouTube thought its systems were prepared to deal with such falsehoods until an account named “mike m” uploaded an old local TV clip of a Parkland activist with the title “DAVID HOGG THE ACTOR . . .” Propelled by conspiracy peddlers, curious onlookers, or some combination thereof, this clip went viral.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

And the users moved in parallel with YouTube’s recommendations, further evidence that it was the algorithm that drove them. That spring, after a school shooting, YouTube’s high-profile “trending” page began promoting an Alex Jones video claiming that the violence had been faked. Jones had pushed versions of this since the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, when he called the murdered twenty children and six teachers “crisis actors” in a vague government plot to justify confiscating guns or imposing martial law. The conspiracy had spread on YouTube ever since, consumed by growing numbers of viewers who, enraged, organized years-long harassment campaigns against the families of the murdered children. Some parents went into hiding, and several filed three separate lawsuits against Jones for defamation.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

When Tufekci watched Donald Trump campaign videos, YouTube began to suggest “white supremacist rants” and Holocaust-denial videos; viewing Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton speeches led to left-wing conspiracy theories and 9/11 “truthers.” At Columbia University, the researcher Jonathan Albright experimentally searched on YouTube for the phrase “crisis actors,” in the wake of a major school shooting, and took the “next up” recommendation from the recommendation system. He quickly amassed 9,000 videos, a large percentage that seemed custom designed to shock, inflame, or mislead, ranging from “rape game jokes, shock reality social experiments, celebrity pedophilia, ‘false flag’ rants, and terror-related conspiracy theories,” as he wrote.

Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 spawned a flood of war propaganda on all sides of the conflict. The Kremlin peddled a steady stream of disinformation, domestically and internationally, which was often echoed by the Chinese government. Russian falsehoods included claims that the United States had bioweapons labs in Ukraine and that Ukrainian civilians injured in Russian attacks were “crisis actors.” Ukrainian defenders, for their part, pumped a steady stream of heroic tales of brave resistance on social media, many of which were false. These included stories about the “Ghost of Kyiv,” a mythical Ukrainian air force pilot who reportedly had downed six Russian planes. Except the video footage circulating online was from a video game.

Wanderers: A Novel by Chuck Wendig

Black Swan, Boston Dynamics, centre right, citizen journalism, clean water, Columbine, coronavirus, crisis actor, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, fake news, game design, global pandemic, hallucination problem, hiring and firing, hive mind, Internet of things, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, oil shale / tar sands, private military company, quantum entanglement, RFID, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, supervolcano, tech bro, TED Talk, uber lyft, white picket fence

She smirked. “What can I say? I’m good at my job. I designed a very effective prediction engine.” She linked her arm in his. “Now we’d better get a move on, don’t you think? The mystery of Maker’s Bell awaits.” Look at this photo of these 11 zombies—four of them are identifiable Antifa crisis actors. This isn’t some foreign attack or some kind of outbreak. This is a leftie conspiracy in action. Stay frosty, spread the word. Two words: fake. news. —user KobraKommandr at r/conspiracy, answering the question, “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen while alone?” JUNE 4 Pine Grove, Pennsylvania “SO LIKE, WHAT THE FUCK is going on here?”

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson

Ada Lovelace, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, bitcoin, blockchain, cloud computing, coherent worldview, computer vision, crisis actor, crossover SUV, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, demographic transition, distributed ledger, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, fake news, false flag, game design, gamification, index fund, Jaron Lanier, life extension, messenger bag, microaggression, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, no-fly zone, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, short selling, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, tech bro, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, The Hackers Conference, Turing test, Works Progress Administration

That vehicle’s license plates were not issued by Utah but by the Municipal Authority of Moab. And Sophia—who had been reading about this—already knew why. The Utah state legislature had been taken over by Moab truthers who insisted that Moab had been obliterated by nuclear terrorism twelve years ago. From which it followed that anyone claiming to actually live there was a troll, a crisis actor in the pay of, or a sad dupe in thrall to, global conspirators trying to foist a monstrous denial of the truth on decent folk. In recognition of, and indignation over, which they had passed a law ordering the state licensing bureau to stop accepting motor vehicle paperwork from Moab. Unable to register vehicles in Utah, the people of Moab had begun printing their own plates, which had actually become a status symbol and desirable swag item in faraway places and produced revenue for the town until being buried under knockoffs.