|
?:reviewBody
|
-
On 9 May 2016, the unreliable web site Superstation95 claimed that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent left a suicide note in New York City warning that a number of frightening conspiracy theories were about to come to pass: Only SuperStation95 reported on the alarming details of suicide note purportedly left at the scene (without any background information on how they came to be in possession of such a sensitive document). Superstation95 is an online presence that is neither a superstation nor a legitimate news source, but rather a repository of misinformation from Hal Turner, a white supremacist who was sentenced in 2010 to 33 months in prison for making death threats against three federal judges. (The individual listed on the site's Contact page is Turner's criminal lawyer.) Beginning in late 2015, Turner's Superstation95 began spreading alarmist hoaxes and conspiracy theories on social media, frequently building upon legitimate tragic or frightening events with falsified details. Among the most widespread of these were claims that a large group of Muslim men fired upon campers and hikers in California, that Fukushima radiation caused severe mutations in marine life, that cargo ships mysteriously ground to a halt and signaled an imminent economic catastrophe, that a deadly Las Vegas strip crash involved a driver shouting Allahu Akbar, that the San Bernardino shooting occurred because the shooter was offended by pork served at a holiday party shortly before the massacre, and that the Earth's magnetosphere collapsed for two hours. The site's claims spanned many conspiracy themes, but remained cohesive in their consistent lack of credibility, accuracy, or respect for the victims of tragedies. As with prior topical yet fabricated information from the site, Superstation95 used an actual event (the death of an ICE agent) to add untruths that seemed to have been written for the sole purpose of gaining pageviews. We contacted the New York Police Department on 9 May 2016 and received the following statement in response:
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}