Happy Nice Mall

“I think it gives them a kind of power,” he said of the people who posted his photo, often of accounts that aim to appear as news outlets. “To mess with someone or to make someone feel bad or to say that they’ve become so insensitive is horrible, it gives them a sense of belonging.”

But what happens next is an even more insidious danger, said Ms. Phillips: “This joke is taken for granted by a large section of society who are prepared to distrust the institutions.

“It exacerbates all the conspiratorial things going on around us and puts us on a dangerous path,” he said. “It further erodes our ability to rely on the same empirical reality.”

Such jokes have a long historical precedent, the researchers said. A man, ComedianFalsely named the gunman in several mass murders, including a shootout in San Bernardino, California, in 2015.

“I don’t think you can find an event of significant magnitude that didn’t happen after that – at this point it’s almost a reflex,” said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the Center for the Informed Community at the university. from Washington. “People today support false flag and crisis actor theories 20 minutes after the event and in very formulated ways.”

Mr. Caulfield described the cycle as “almost factory production happening like clockwork”.

In Mr Jordan’s case, his photo resurfaces in social media posts from accounts that impersonate news outlets and even copy their logos. A report of the execution of “Bernie” by Taliban soldiers in Kabul last year was posted on Twitter from @CNNAfghan, a fake account Twitter suspended, and then reinforced by another suspended account, @BBCAfghanNews. death.

It was also announced that “Bernie” was the victim of a hurricane in Kentucky in 2021 and an explosion in Beirut, Lebanon in 2020. @FoxNewsUkraine, a fake account with 17 followers and also suspended, this year was a right-wing journalist who was killed in Mariupol while “two followers @RussiaCnn said he was a pilot who was shot down while flying towards Russia.