Anatomy of a Fake News Hashtag: How the Alt-Right Spread #SyriaHoax

The Atlantic Council is an international affairs think tank which promotes constructive leadership and engagement in international affairs. The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab analyzed the spread on Twitter of a false story alleging that the Syria chemical weapons attack on Tuesday, April 4 was a false-flag attack. This is a summary of the DFR Lab analysis.
 
Tuesday, April 4, there was an attack on the town of Khan Sheikhun in northern Syria. The victims, mostly civilians, appeared to have been exposed to Sarin gas, which survivors said had been delivered by warplanes.
 
The same day, Al-Masdar News, a website which supports the Syrian government, published an article that claimed that the attack was not a chemical weapons attack by the government. The article was written by Paul Antonopolous, a frequent contributor to RT, the Russian state-sponsored news outlet.

Al-Masdar News published this photo from the White Helmets, the aid organization nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016. The website claimed that this picture called into question the claim that sarin gas had been used, since the aid workers would not be able to care for patients without gloves.

---

Photo credit: White Helmets/Al-Masdar News

The website went on to call into question Twitter messages sent by a doctor who claimed to be on the scene. The article quoted a Twitter message from @WithinSyriaBlog which quoted a post from Orient TV, which claimed that there were reports of chemical attacks in the area reported a day early.

Over the next two days, the Al-Masdar News story was picked up by a number of pro-Russia and anti-U.S. websites.

At least three conspiracy website picked up the story and published it verbatim: 

• GlobalResearchCA
• Information Clearinghouse
• The Lifeboat News

Several pro-Kremlin sites known for publishing fake news quoted from the original Al Masdar News story:

• The Duran
• IWB
• The Russophile (also known as Russia News Now)
• New Euro-Med DK
• MINA

​Several other sites wrote their own stories, relying heavily on the original Al Masdar story:

• Conservative Refocus
• Friends of Syria
• InfoWars
• Blacklisted News
• Before It’s News
• 21st Century Wire

The most influential site in the U.S. to pick up the story was InfoWars, a site very popular among the alt-right. On April 5, according to the DFR Lab analysis, "Infowars ran a long article claiming that the White Helmets — which it presented as funded by billionaire George Soros — were in fact behind the attack and saying that the attack had 'all the hallmarks of a false flag.'"

InfoWars clearly relied heavily on the original story, either using the original or one of the stories that relied on it as the source. InfoWars published the story on the website, and also Tweeted it and it was reTweeted more than 300 times. Author Alex Jones also Tweeted the story, and it was reTweeted from him over 400 times.

The biggest boost to the story came from a Twitter account called @magicpoledancer, which warned President Trump against intervention and used the hashtag #SyriaHoax.

Source: Twitter/DFL Lab

This account was created in March 2017, and the first Tweet came from the account April 4.  While this account only had 14 followers, the Tweet got 92 reTweets. The profile of the account contains a quote from Russian author Bakunin: "Capitalism and communism are two sides of the same coin."

The hashtag #SyriaHoax was picked up by alt-right video blogger Mike Cernovich on April 6. It is unclear whether Cernovich picked up the hashtag from @poledancer or came up with it himself. He likely picked up the story from Alex Jones and InfoWars, since an April 5 Tweet asserted that he would soon be meeting with Jones, and a March 2 Tweet suggested that he believes that Jones deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The hashtag quickly went viral, largely due to accounts that appear to be computer-generated "bot" accounts.

Source: Twitter/DFL Lab

The suspected bot accounts reTweeted the story and the hashtag more than 3,000 times in 6 hours on April 6. The hashtag received a total of 20,000 posts over that time. The 40 suspected bot accounts were responsible for about 15 percent of the total activity over that time.

Several "sleeper" accounts appear to have been activated to help boost the hashtag and make it go viral. These are accounts that were formed prior to March or April of 2017, but the majority of their total activity came over a period of a few hours and was all related to a specific hashtag.

The DFR Lab Analysis concludes:

"What is noteworthy is the way in which the regime’s response, launched on a site which has repeatedly amplified Assad’s messaging, was translated rapidly and directly into coverage on alt-right websites, most obviously Infowars.
In the process, the alt-right sites used the same arguments, backed up with the same evidence, and taken from the same sources, as the Al-Masdar original. This was not a case of the alt-right arguing on behalf of the Assad regime as much as amplifying it."

The entire DFR Lab analysis, written by Ben Nimmo and Donara Barojan, can be found here.
https://medium.com/dfrlab/how-the-alt-right-brought-syriahoax-to-america-47745118d1c9