Hawaii was among a number of communities targeted in recent days by a sophisticated disinformation campaign spread on social media.

Yesterday, Attorney General issued a press release warning of social media platforms that “spread misinformation through false postings.”

Some of those rumors warned of men traveling to Hawaii to disrupt peaceful protests planned for this weekend.

Today local tech guru Ryan Ozawa shared information on this disinformation campaign. It’s important enough that I’m taking the liberty of resharing it here.

Ozawa wrote:

You know those rumors of outside agitators threatening to disrupt local protests or worse? Rumors so pervasive law enforcement gets a deluge of reports and has to debunk them? They’re probably not the work of local pranksters getting jollies stirring things up. And that should worry and anger you.

Below is a Twitter thread by Molly McKew, writer and lecturer on Russian influence and information warfare, and senior advisor to the Stand Up Republic Foundation on defusing disinformation. You can read it yourself (and additional commentary) here:

https://twitter.com/mollymckew/status/1269078013968297984?s=21

“You’ve probably seen messages purporting busses of ‘outside agitators’ or ‘antifa’ are coming to tear up your town.

I’ll have a column up tomorrow, in the meantime:
-They are a psychological operation
-They’ve achieved behavioral outcomes toward escalating unrest
-It’s bad.

You can help
If you see tweets, posts, text messages, or screenshots like this — they are a psychological operation. They are targeting communities all over. I’ve seen versions for half a dozen places. This information is not real.

Same shit as “martial law” texts before COVID-19.

These are just a handful of screenshots and examples that y’all flagged for me when I posted about this before.

Together, the techniques and patterns are clear. Second-hand insider info. These are hyper-localized messages spreading in ways that can evade detection.

In many instances, local police have had to respond. Mostly they say “this isn’t happening here,” because there are layers and layers of bad, false, inflammatory info coming from Fox News, right-world, and the White House on this theme, which local cops can’t get into.

In many instances, these messages coincide with places where armed militias and vigilante groups have organized against the kind of unrest rumored to be coming to smaller towns and cities. Again, Fox beats this drum hard. But the false messages make the threat about us.

The goal seems to be to raise anxieties, amplify perceptions of chaos/unrest, escalate possibility for conflict between us.

What can you do?
-don’t spread these msgs
-Push back
-Amplify articles showing they are false
-amplify messages from local media/authorities debunking them

My column this weekend will have more information about how these messages work and their impact.
In the meantime, you can catch up on past pieces on rage, conspiracies, being a better information citizen, and more, here:

https://standuprepublic.com/category/defusing-disinfo/

And I just want to re-emphasize:

I very rarely post about this stuff in such explicit terms. I am very, very concerned about how rapidly these messages spread and found the right targets BEFORE anyone really noticed the nationwide reach.

Someone is targeting Americans with this. Also, you should be really pissed about it. Not British pissed, American pissed. That alone was justification enough for the revolution.

Also: there seems to be a new version of this targeting the left instead of the right, similar themes and tactics.

More as it develops.”