Screenshots of two rambling social media posts — one from Facebook, one from Instagram — form the sum total of the evidence police used last summer to justify an aerial surveillance operation in North California, records obtained by the nonprofit transparency group Property of the People and reporting by the Guardian show. The paper reported Monday on events surrounding the California Highway Patrol’s decision in June 2020 to deploy surveillance aircraft to hunt for an (fake) caravan of left-wing “terrorists,” who were ostensibly on a roundtrip across California, smashing windows and starting fires. The rumoured invasion, which failed to materialise, but prompted armed displays by right-wing extremists in cities across the Northwest, stemmed from social media posts made viral by an army of accounts claiming “Antifa” was on a travelling rampage. First, Twitter took action, saying the rumours had been boosted by “hundreds of spammy accounts” as part of a coordinated disinformation campaign. Facebook followed soon after, citing details shared by its competitor. Many of the accounts posed as members of “Antifa” or as official “Antifa” accounts while warning of the caravan’s movements. None of them were real.
In reality, the campaign was launched by a white hate group, company officials said, one whose notoriety is tied to 2017’s “Unite the Right” rally; a bloody event staged by neo-Nazis and Klansmen defending the Confederacy, which capped off with a murder. The Guardian’s new details add a chapter an already bizarre saga about a California sheriff who, in the summer of 2020, also insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, that a band of anti-fascists were roaming the countryside, mayhem and madness in tow. Documents obtained by Property for the People offer a singular look at how officers in California’s rural, northern counties — mostly “known for weed farms and hiking and [being] overwhelmingly white,” the Guardian notes — got duped into promoting the same false claims themselves, meanwhile throwing taxpayer resources at a phantom threat that even residents said beggared belief. Despite the volume of journalists and law enforcement officials reporting the rumours were false, Humboldt County’s sheriff, William Honsal, refused to back down on the claims, which he promoted via his weekly “media availability” videos. Lost Coast Outpost, a news site covering California’s northwest, documented Honsal’s insistence he’d seen “substantiated, law enforcement reports” about “buses full of people” hurdling toward the state.
via gizmodo: News-Illiterate Cops Order Air Hunt for ‘Antifa’ Citing Neo-Nazi Rumours That Triggered Armed Mobs
