Inside the Conspiracy Theory That Turned Syria’s First Responders Into Terrorists

From Wired

SYRIA CIVIL DEFENCE is a volunteer corps of 3,300 first responders, fighting a losing battle in a devastated nation. You’ve likely seen its members—known as White Helmets—in photos on social media, carrying dusty, injured children out of bombsites. They’ve saved nearly 100,000 Syrians who otherwise would have been fatalities of the country’s ongoing civil war. They were nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize last year.

And simply by listing those facts, this story has become “fake news.”

While the White Helmets might seem like the poster children for feel-bad humanitarianism, they’ve in fact become the target of a internet smear campaign, one designed to bolster the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and undermine its opponents, including the United States. Various White Helmet “truthers”—who range from Assad and his supporters to Russian embassies, and even to Alex Jones—accuse the group of staging rescue photos, belonging to al Qaeda, and being pawns of liberal bogeyman George Soros. The story of how that conspiracy grew is a perfect distillation of how disinformation can spread unchecked, supplanting fact with frenzy where no support exists.

Start With Lack of Information
Like any conspiracy theory, this one feeds on ignorance. Most outside Syria only know the conflict’s broad strokes, and thus have little reason to doubt seemingly authoritative sources. “Disasters are an opportunistic social media moment,” says Brian Houston, director of the Disaster and Community Crisis Center at the University of Missouri. “If you heard about a storm and you saw someone tweeting pictures of a tornado, why wouldn’t you believe it was the right one?” That presumed trust provides the perfect growth medium for disinformation, like when Reddit erroneously treated an art project like a news dispatch.

It also gives bad actors fertile ground to sow disinformation—actors like ISIS, which has already leveraged the power of shareable content. “Jihadists are translating their core ideas into pictorial memes, like the one-finger salute that stands for the oneness of God and the destruction of the West,” says Jytte Klausen, who teaches courses on terrorism and international relations at Brandeis University. In the war for hearts and minds, a photo beats a big block of text any day.

But in the cast of the one-finger salute, it’s also a prime opportunity for fueling a conspiracy theory. After all, you see even non-ISIS members raising a single finger all over the place. Like, say, Obama. Or even the White Helmets:

Read more: https://www.wired.com/2017/04/white-helmets-conspiracy-theory/

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