“I think this gives them a form of power,” he said of the people posting his photo, often under accounts meant to look like they’re from news organizations. “Fooling around with someone or making someone feel bad, or saying that it’s just horrible what they’re so desensitized to, that makes them feel like they belong.”
But what happens next is the even more insidious danger, Ms Phillips said: The joke is taken on the face of it by the sizable portion of people who are already ready to mistrust the institutions of society.
“It just exacerbates all the conspiratorial stuff we have and puts us on a dangerous course,” she said. “It further impairs our ability to be grounded in the same empirical reality.”
Such jokes have a long historical precedent, researchers say. A man, a comedianhas been incorrectly named as the gunman in several mass murders, including a 2015 San Bernardino, California shooting.
“I don’t think you can find an event of significant magnitude where it doesn’t happen in the aftermath — it’s almost a reflex right now,” said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington. “Today, people are promoting false flag and crisis actor theories 20 minutes after the event, and in very formulaic ways.”
Mr Caulfield described the cycle as “almost factory production running like clockwork”.
In Mr. Jordan’s case, his photo has resurfaced in social media posts from accounts mimicking news channels and even copying their logos. A report last year that “Bernie” had been executed by Taliban soldiers in Kabul was posted to Twitter from @CNNAfghan, a fake account that Twitter has suspended, and then amplified by @BBCAfghanNews, another suspended account, that “multiple reports ” of death.
“Bernie” has also been described as a victim of a 2021 Kentucky tornado and an explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, in 2020. @FoxNewsUkraine, a fake account with 17 followers that has also been suspended, claimed this year that he was “a right-wing journalist” who was killed in Mariupol, while @RussiaCnn, who has two followers, said he was a pilot who had been shot while flying to Russia.
