False flag labeling exploded only after social media made theorizing easy.

Evidence

Jones lost his job at an Austin public radio station after diving too deep into the false flag pool, leading him to found InfoWars and colonize what became an improbably large section of the media landscape. (In his book Them, Jon Ronson describes Jones’s early days broadcasting via an ISDN line out of one of his kids’ bedrooms, with “choo-choo train wallpaper and an Empire Strikes Back poster pinned on the wall.”) After 9/11, he had a lot more company: more and more events were labeled as false flags staged by the government by more and more people with blogs, YouTube channels, Twitter accounts, and websites. The targets of their investigations ranged from the mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut in 2012 and a San Bernardino community center in 2015, to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 in 2014 (which was speculated to have been carried out by the CIA or the Israeli government), and the 2017 suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England (which some American conspiracy theorists thought was perpetrated to distract from the discussion around DNC staffer Seth Rich’s death). Interestingly, the first major school shooting, at Columbine High School, wasn’t a popular false flag theory when it took place in 1999, before the age of YouTube, easily buildable blogs, and widely used social media platforms. Instead, that shooting was retroactively identified as a possible false flag years later by the truther community. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 371

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to communication-technology determinism claims in the reader’s library (Innis’s bias of communication) — tools shape which fears can gain traction.