Everything Is a ‘False Flag’ Now

False-flag operations, which are carried out by governments or militaries in an effort to blame an adversary for something they did not actually do, have a rich history. In one of the most famous examples, German soldiers pretended that Polish troops had stormed across the Poland-Germany border in 1939 and taken over a German radio station. The next day, Germany invaded Poland—and Adolf Hitler referenced the previous day’s fake attack in order to legitimize the incursion.

But for as much as real false-flag incidents have occurred, conspiracy theorists have used these histories as a way of legitimizing false-flag conspiracy theories. Major incidents, including the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the September 11 attacks, and the Sandy Hook school shooting, are framed by conspiracy theorists as false flags. Today, after any major incident—whether it’s the attempted assassination of Trump last year, the devastating Texas flooding this month, or the shooting of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman in June—people on the right and left now regularly respond by claiming they are simply distractions.

“Vance Boelter is not a real person,” one X account holder posted about the charged Minnesota shooter. “This is a false flag psyop that the news media is using to instill fear into the people.”

In her report, de la Fuente Suárez outlines a number of reasons why these conspiracy theories have flourished online, including the collapse in trust of mainstream media and public institutions, social media platforms abandoning fact-checking, and the rise in popularity of so-called “news influencers” like Peters. “It creates the sense that nothing can be trusted, that all we read, we see, we hear, on TV, on the news, it's part of this deception,” de la Fuente Suárez says. “But one of the things that concerns me the most is that within these frameworks, those that are harmed in these attacks are also dehumanized. They are depicted not as victims of attacks, but as these elements of a grand staged plan of deception, downplaying acts of violence and the suffering of the victims in it.”

De la Fuente Suárez says that antisemitism is also driving false-flag conspiracies to an unprecedented level.

Antisemitic posts were among the main drivers of the most recent spike in false-flag conspiracies on X. This began, she says, in response to the shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers who were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, on May 21. Less than two weeks later, a man in Boulder, Colorado, allegedly used incendiary devices to attack participants in a march held to support Israeli hostages in Gaza.

“False Flag 100%,” a conspiracy-focused X account posted two days after the DC shooting. The post was accompanied by a video of the immediate aftermath of the shooting and has been viewed 3.6 million times to date.

In the aftermath of the Boulder attack, an X account that describes its author as an “anti-zionist Jew” posted an image of the suspected attacker with the caption: “This man is an Israeli agent who has just perpetrated a false flag event in Boulder Colorado.” The post has been viewed over 2.2 millions times.

“Antisemitism is at the center of these conspiracy claims, so they resonate more, and in these moments, it's just an easy response and one that is, in many cases, very difficult to debunk,” says de la Fuente Suárez.

Other experts see the rise in false-flag conspiracy theories as a reflection of the increasingly fractured political environment.

"The rise in false-flag conspiracy theories is closely tied to the political climate,” Pradeep Krishnan, an expert in conspiracy theory and communication at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, tells WIRED. “The Trump presidency has mainstreamed conspiracist rhetoric to mobilize political distrust and promote antiestablishment sentiment.”