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Must Reads: 'Crisis actors' and the Internet's 'firehose of hatred'
Craig Timberg had never spent time on the anonymous and often ugly online forum 8chan. Then he and Drew Harwell, both national technology reporters, spent days combing through some of the Internet's darkest corners after 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland, Fla. They were trying to conduct a "forensic investigation of conspiracy theories," Timberg said, to understand how false stories about "crisis actors” took root on 8chan, 4chan, Reddit and then spread on social media.
"Both Drew and I were curious if we could get closer to what happened," said Timberg, who has spent 20 years at The Post covering everything from the Virginia legislature to post-apartheid South Africa. Timberg used search and privacy tools Duck Duck Go and Tor to find the forum's most revealing threads and "retroactively eavesdrop on these conversations."
"We built a spread sheet that showed how this story played out over days," Timberg said. To do so, they had to read thousands of posts, many filled with racist, anti-Semitic and sexist slurs. "It was a firehose of hate," Timberg said. But wading through it allowed them to produce a revealing story about the way the Internet has become what Harwell and Timberg call "a potent tool of deception wielded by political extremists, disinformation warriors and conspiracy theorists."
— Lynda Robinson, Local enterprise editor
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