Inside the Bizarre Misinformation Campaign About a Hoax Blackout in DC

“It seems like an operation to sow confusion.”

Demonstrators in Washington, DC on Sunday.Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

In the late hours of Sunday and early Monday morning, as Washington, DC, was in the throes of massive protests and police used teargas, rubber bullets, and what appeared to be flashbangs on demonstrators drawn out by the death of George Floyd, something confusing started happening online: the hashtag #DCBlackout started going viral on Twitter, accompanied by similar posts on Facebook and Reddit, claiming that sometime at around 1 am, internet service had gone down throughout the district, blocking people from using the internet or posting what was happening on social media. 

There is almost no evidence that suggests that this actually happened. Mother Jones reporters in DC who were using the internet at the time didnā€™t notice outages, and no media outlets noticed or confirmed this either.

Regardless, the claim spread. Just as quickly as #DCBlackout was catching on, another wave of accounts started to push back. Except instead of being good samaritan accounts trying to push back on disinformation, they appeared to be apart of a coordinated network of accounts working at once to spread the exact same message:

ā€œYeahā€¦ā€¦ as someone seeing #dcblackout trending, who lives and works in the DC metro area, and who has friends telecommuting into DC rnā€¦.. this hashtag looks like misinformation. ‘No social media from DC’ because we were asleep. Stop scaring people. #dcsafe,ā€ dozens of accounts posted.

As he was watching all of this play out, Darius Kazemi, an independent researcher and programmer with years of experience researching social media and bots, knew he was seeing something weird.

“It seems like an operation to sow confusion by stoking the fire on both sides,ā€ Kazemi, a former fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, explained on the phone. While Kazemi caveated that there was still a lot he wasnā€™t sure of and that he didnā€™t have proof for any of his suspicions about motivations, he observed that many of the accounts, both those pushing #DCBlackout and refuting it, were engaged in what seemed to be coordinated behavior by all posting the same thing.

ā€œWhether it’s bots (meaning automated software) or trolls (individuals or groups of individuals organizing to create chaos), I can’t tell because the situation is rapidly evolving,ā€ Kazemi wrote in a tweet thread. ā€œAlso it’s very hard to tell what ‘side’ these accounts are on, as floating around I’ve seen claims, counterclaims, counter-counterclaims, and even counter-counter-counterclaims.ā€

He noted that some of the accounts appeared to have been potentially hacked, because they either posted the #dcblackout hashtag but quickly deleted it, or posted accompanying messages saying that they didnā€™t mean to post about the supposed blackout and that they werenā€™t sure how they had. Kazemi also said that many participating accounts appeared to have been created very recentlyā€”within the last month or so.

Besides the fact there was almost certainly no telecommunications or internet blackout last night, itā€™s unclear exactly what happened and who was pushing the disinformation.

However, Twitter confirmed that at least some of Kazemiā€™s suspicions were correct. A company spokesperson told Mother Jones over email that the campaign had been sustained with scam accounts, and that it is ā€œtaking action proactively on any coordinated attempts to disrupt the public conversation around this issueā€ and is ā€œactively investigating the hashtag #dcblackout and during that process have already suspended hundreds of spammy accounts that Tweeted using the hashtag.ā€

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate