Washington, July 20, 2024 – A surge of online conspiracy theories emerged on Friday, ranging from fearmongering about an impending “World War III” to fabricated stories connecting a global elite to a cyberattack, following a significant IT crash.
Airlines, banks, television networks, and financial institutions plunged into chaos following a significant crash, one of the largest in recent memory, caused by a defective software update to an antivirus program running on Microsoft Windows.
The surge of internet-breaking conspiracy theories on social media platforms, many of which have dismantled the safeguards that previously curbed the spread of misinformation, exemplifies the emerging norm of information disorder following significant global incidents.
The outage gave way to a swirl of evidence-free posts on X, the Elon Musk-owned site formerly known as Twitter, that peddled an apocalyptic narrative: The world was under attack by a nefarious force.
“I read somewhere once that ww3 (World War III) would be mostly a cyber war,” one user wrote on X.
The IT crash also stirred up an unfounded theory that the World Economic Forum — long a magnet for wild falsehoods — had plotted a global cyberattack.
To lend credibility to that theory, numerous posts referenced an old WEF video that cautioned about the potential for a “cyberattack with Covid-like characteristics.” This video, found on the WEF’s website, advised that disconnecting millions of susceptible devices from one another and the internet would be the sole method to halt the cyber threat’s rapid proliferation.
– ‘Sad testament’ –
The WEF has long been a target for conspiracy theorists pushing the idea of a shadowy cabal of elites working for private gain under the garb of solving global issues.
Also gaining rapid traction online were conspiratorial posts using the hashtag “cyber polygon,” a reference to a global training event aimed at preparing for potential future attacks.
“The proliferation of conspiracy theories in the wake of major global events such as the outage is a sad testament to the volatile nature of the information ecosystem,” Rafi Mendelsohn, vice president at the disinformation security company Cyabra, told AFP.
“What is unique to events like these is how social media platforms, forums, and messaging apps facilitate the rapid dissemination of content, allowing theories to gain traction quickly and reach a global audience.”
The trend highlights how falsehoods can transform into viral narratives on technology platforms, which have reduced content moderation and restored accounts known for spreading misinformation.
During fast-developing news events, confusion now often reigns on major tech platforms, with users scrambling to obtain accurate information in what appears to be a sea of false or misleading posts that rapidly gain traction.
– ‘Nefarious motives’ –
“This poses the larger question of combatting mis- and disinformation,” Michael W. Mosser, executive director of the Global Disinformation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, told AFP.
“The level of trust that is required to accept information from reputable sources has declined to such an extent that people are more willing to believe wild conspiracies that ‘must be true’ rather than the factual information relayed to them.”
The global outage, which brought myriad aspects of daily life to a standstill and sent US stocks falling, was linked to a bug in an update to an antivirus program for Windows systems from American cybersecurity group CrowdStrike.
The Austin-based company’s CEO, George Kurtz, assured that CrowdStrike had implemented a fix and was “actively working” to address the crisis, yet this did little to curb the proliferation of online conspiracy theories.
“Combatting this misinformation with factual rebuttals is difficult, because the issue is so technical,” Mosser said.
“Explaining that the fault was in an improperly configured system file and that a fix is in process may be accurate, but it is not believed by those who are predisposed to see nefarious motives behind failures.”
