1/10/2024 0 Comments Next space rebels loopings![]() As the virtual assault unfolded, it was complemented by text messages to actual residents in St. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster, which cited the fake YouTube video. The YouTube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. told me the investigation was still open.) “It was just someone who just liked scaring the daylights out of people.” Authorities, he said, had tried to trace the numbers that the text messages had come from, but with no luck. “Personally I think it’s just a real sad, sick sense of humor,” he told me. When I called Arthur a few months later, he dismissed the incident as a tasteless prank, timed to the anniversary of the attacks of Sept. Roughly two hours after the first text message was sent, the company put out a news release, explaining that reports of an explosion were false. He called Columbian Chemicals, which reported no problems at the plant. Mary Parish, Duval Arthur quickly made a few calls and found that none of his employees had sent the alert. It was all fake: the screenshot, the videos, the photographs. A woman named Anna McClaren tweeted at Karl Rove: “Karl, Is this really ISIS who is responsible for #ColumbianChemicals? Tell that we should bomb Iraq!” But anyone who took the trouble to check CNN.com would have found no news of a spectacular Sept. ISIS had claimed credit for the attack, according to one YouTube video in it, a man showed his TV screen, tuned to an Arabic news channel, on which masked ISIS fighters delivered a speech next to looping footage of an explosion. Another posted a screenshot of CNN’s home page, showing that the story had already made national news. Louisiana is really screwed now,” a user named tweeted at the New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Heather Nolan. “Heather, I’m sure that the explosion at the #ColumbianChemicals is really dangerous. Others shared a video in which thick black smoke rose in the distance.ĭozens of journalists, media outlets and politicians, from Louisiana to New York City, found their Twitter accounts inundated with messages about the disaster. posted a video of surveillance footage from a local gas station, capturing the flash of the explosion. shared an image of flames engulfing the plant. The #ColumbianChemicals hashtag was full of eyewitness accounts of the horror in Centerville. ![]() “A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana #ColumbianChemicals,” a man named Jon Merritt tweeted. Hundreds of Twitter accounts were documenting a disaster right down the road. If Arthur had checked Twitter, he might have become much more worried.
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