(Washington) A third world war imminent? A major cyberattack launched by global elites? Conspiracy theories are pouring onto the web after an unprecedented computer failure.
A faulty update to Microsoft’s Windows operating system rocked the planet Friday, grounding planes, putting workers out of work and roiling financial markets.
The American cybersecurity group CrowdStrike, one of whose software programs was the cause of the outage, has ruled out the idea of a cyberattack or a computer security problem.
But that hasn’t stopped conspiracy theories from proliferating on social media, many of which have removed the safeguards that prevent the spread of false information. An illustration of the fact that today, information chaos almost systematically follows a global event.
“I read somewhere that World War III will be mainly a cyber war,” wrote one user on X (ex-Twitter).
Some believe the outage was a cyberattack launched by the World Economic Forum, a foundation bringing together executives, multinational bosses, bankers, billionaires and intellectuals, which meets every year in the luxurious Swiss ski resort of Davos.
“Global audience”
Those who share this false theory are basing their claim on an old video available on the Forum’s website, which warns of the possibility of a “cyberattack that has characteristics similar to those of COVID-19.”
PHOTO YUKI IWAMURA, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Screens in Times Square were dark due to the global blackout in New York on Friday.
The video warns that the only way to stop the cyberattack would be to disconnect millions of vulnerable devices from the networks.
The World Economic Forum has long been the target of conspiracy theorists, convinced of the existence of a caste of elites with obscure objectives working for private ends under the pretext of solving the world’s problems.
“The proliferation of conspiracy theories in the wake of major global events like this outage is a sad testament to the volatile nature of the information ecosystem,” Rafi Mendelsohn, vice president of disinformation firm Cyabra, told AFP.
“What is unique about these kinds of events is how social media, forums and messaging apps facilitate the rapid dissemination of publications, allowing theories to gain traction quickly and reach a global audience.”
Without safeguards and effective moderation, networks find themselves overwhelmed by these theories and confusion reigns in this torrent of disinformation.
“Malicious motives”
“This raises the broader question of how we combat fake news and disinformation,” said Michael Mosser, director of a center for research on disinformation at the University of Texas at Austin.
“The level of trust in reliable sources has declined so much that people are more likely to believe conspiracy theories that ‘appear to be true’ rather than factual information.”
The computer outage was caused by a bug in an update to a security program for Windows operating systems. Although its CEO George Kurtz tried to reassure users by saying that the bug was “being fixed,” that did not stop Internet users from speculating.
“It’s difficult to combat this misinformation with factual refutations because the problem is very technical,” Mosser says.
“Explaining that the problem is a misconfigured system file and that a fix is in the works may be accurate, but is not believed by those who are predisposed to seeing malicious motives behind errors.”