Fortune
It didn’t take long for the conspiracy theorists to weave a fresh tragedy into their twisted narrative. Just hours after a disturbed 18-year-old armed with an AR-15 assault rifle and racist hate walked into a grocery store in Buffalo and murdered 10 innocent people, on Sunday, May 15, the mass shooting was already being reimagined as part of a plot involving some of the world’s largest companies.

The thread is convoluted, but it boils down to this: A rising number of zealots in the internet’s back alleys, like 8kun, BitChute, and GETTR—egged on by the scare-mongering pundits Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson—insist the hate crime was a false flag operation orchestrated by U.S. federal agents, who trained the shooter and arranged the attack as a means of rekindling public calls for gun control. “It’s really just an exemplar of how the far right tries to shift attention away from something that just happened,” says Welton Chang, the founder of A.I. startup Pyrra Technologies, which is positioning itself to help organizations arm themselves against disinformation. “In the post–Sandy Hook era, the false flag stuff is pretty much automatic whenever there’s a mass shooting.” MORE