Search for “LAPD scanner” on Twitter right now and you’ll see it—a video showing radio traffic in which two vile racists laugh and joke about killing protesters. “We gotta start shooting to kill, man. Mr Trump said so, shoot to kill,” one voice says. “Come one, come all. $100 a head. Every [n-word] you kill, $100. $50 for a Mexican,” the other responds.
On Tiktok, Facebook, and Twitter, the video has racked up over a million views as users have taken the audio and added videos of their reaction to the recording. One problem: it’s not true. While the audio is an authentic depiction of two authentically terrible human beings, they’re civilians not affiliated with the Los Angeles police or using police radios.
The viral LAPD clip is one drop in a tidal wave of misinformation spreading around social media during the current unrest. As protests grew across the country, Americans invented fake fires to ravage through children’s hospitals and turned humble piles of bricks into a boogeyman supply chain. Pundits and politicians may be warning that foreign trolls are just waiting to stoke racial tensions as protests rock the country. When they do, they’re going to have to speak up extra loud because right now they’re being drowned out by a chorus of disinformation of our own making.
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Trash site
Social media is a cesspool even on a good day, but with the police killing of George Floyd and protests that followed, the Internet has become even more rife with bile and misinformation. Who’s responsible for it? Sen. Marco Rubio pinned the blame in part on outside agitators, counting three unnamed adversaries he said were “actively stoking & promoting violence & confrontation from multiple angles.”
But here’s the thing: Experts who track foreign disinformation campaigns just aren’t seeing the usual suspects show up to play yet.
“The scale and scope of domestic disinformation—created by Americans and targeting Americans—is far greater than anything a foreign adversary could possibly do to us. The irony is the thriving supply and demand of domestic disinformation makes us even more vulnerable to foreign efforts,” Graham Brookie, who runs the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Lab, told The Daily Beast. “Blaming others for our own disinformation and division ignores the extremely uncomfortable truths we have to address to move forward. We can’t just call anything we disagree with disinformation.”
In the meantime, domestically produced conspiracies and misinformation about the protests are all too easy to find.
Game of telephone
The “LAPD scanner” viral video is an edited clip from a series of videos posted on Twitter on Saturday. The video shows a woman reacting in horror as the push-to-talk walkie talkie—a model incapable of picking up police frequencies—picks up the terrorist fantasies of the two men. The woman never claims the men are Los Angeles police but wonders if they should be reported. "I feel like making a police report because they're talking about shooting African-Americans," she says.
What began as a legitimate concern about terrorist threats that needed to be reported to the police, morphed into a fake LAPD bounty for killing different minority groups. The edited audio has been spliced into hundreds of different TikTok videos, racking up thousands of views, and has spread even to verified accounts on Twitter. One especially popular post of the audio on Twitter racked up 70,000 retweets and over 1.2 million views.
Spreading like fire
As protesters in some cities lit fires in police cars and dumpsters, a meme quickly spread around Twitter and Facebook that a Children’s Hospital—one of the most terrifying places a fire could break out—was burning down. The posts started out claiming that the hospital was in Columbus, Birmingham, Dallas, Chicago, Omaha.
Only no children’s hospitals were on fire. The fake news was started by a viral post from a Dallas man who posted an image of Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus with smoke in the background. Columbus did have a fire nearby—fire officials say a “suspicious” fire broke out at an empty apartment building—but the hospitals there and all around the country weren’t burned. Children’s of Alabama went so far as to issue a statement saying reports of a blaze were false and that they remained open and safe.
But by that point, the idea that protesters had lit a children’s hospital on fire in an act of wanton cruelty had broken free from the shoddy photo editing that supported it, and formed into a cudgel for those criticizing the demonstrations to attack supporters. By Monday, it had become a staple in Twitter arguments about the protests.
Narrative construction
The belief that mass violence, like mass disinformation, couldn’t possibly be the result of organic activity also extended to the humble paving brick. Under any other circumstance, seeing construction materials in an urban area wouldn’t get anyone’s attention. But in the hyper politicized climate, they’ve taken on a new and undeservedly ominous tenor.
Conservative pundits like convicted criminal and former New York police commissioner Bernie Kerik and Sen. Ted Cruz have suggested that the protests around the country could only be possible with the assistance of some ill-defined, conspiratorial support network. Farther down the punditry trough, 4Chan trolls have played off a version of this conspiracy theory, passing off a list of charities and defense lawyers popular among protesters as some kind of shadowy support infrastructure rather than the public fundraising campaign it represents.
That’s how piles of bricks at urban construction sites turned into breadcrumbs leading to a sinister cabal of riot suppliers. It started with an Instagram video of peaceful protesters claiming that a pile of bricks left outside a courthouse in Dallas was a “setup.” From there, the video took on a completely different life as a host of conservative and far-right conspiracy theorists seized on the video as evidence of a conspiracy. Q-anon, Rush Limbaugh fan groups, chemtrails believers. Trump supporters used the video as evidence that the single pile of bricks in Dallas was evidence that violence all around the country was “pre-planned” and supplied by liberal financier and frequent conspiracy boogeyman George Soros.
From that humble pile of bricks, an entire edifice of misinformation grew. Twitter conspiracy theorists racked up thousands of retweets pointing to a random pallet of bricks on the side of a road in Frisco, Texas as evidence of preparations for pre-planned violent demonstrations until local police had to confirm that they belonged to a renovation project for a homeowner’s association.
The conspiracy meme has now broken through to mainstream media with Fox News suggesting that the presence of construction materials in a city is somehow noteworthy or unusual.
Hack attack?
In a press conference on Sunday Minnesota Governor Tim Walz announced that Minneapolis city websites had been the victim of a “sophisticated” distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, adding “That’s not someone sitting in their basement.”
Gov. Walz’s comments made it sound as though a nation-state could be involved. On social media, accounts claiming to speak for the long-dormant hacker collective, Anonymous, tried to claim credit for the attack.
No one quite knows who’s behind it, but DDoS attacks are such a common, attainable course of cyber vandalism that the mere fact that it happened tells us almost nothing about who’s behind it.
“I'd say that given the wide variety of ways to perform a DDoS attack, and the number of ways anybody can obtain or hire a DDoS attack, it's impossible at this point to attribute such an attack to anyone. All such claims should be treated with tremendous skepticism,” James Harris, a former FBI agent who runs a cybersecurity consultancy, told The Daily Beast.
Operational constraints: It’s not that known nation-state disinformation actors like Russia, Iran, or China wouldn’t try to exploit race, to their own ends. We know they did in 2016. We know they’ve been doing it as recently as a few months ago. But while Russia is still running the same racial division playbook, tougher moderation from social media companies and sanctions from the U.S. and others have made the kind of loud, blatant, and high follower count sock puppets that made Russian trolls famous years ago too difficult.
Instead, Russian linked trolls have upped their operational security with smaller and less visible personas who seed social media with forgeries and leaks in the hopes that someone else will take them viral. Those tactics make it harder for Russian trolls to find an audience as the rate of social media usage in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd has skyrocketed to levels not seen since the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US.
To the extent that foreign actors have tried to use the unrest for propaganda, it’s largely been tame and overt.
“We have seen what we could characterize as opportunistic or overly editorialized state media coverage or troll-ish official statements, but those are hardly shaping the conversation in the United States,” says Brookie.
