Source Hacking: A Disinformation Retrospective on the Parkland Shooting
By Thalia Beaty & Benjamin T. Decker at Storyful
On the day after the Parkland shooting, a fringe right-wing anti-Semitic group called the Republic of Florida (ROF) claimed Nikolas Cruz, the man accused of killing at least 17 people, had trained with them.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) first reported the alleged link after speaking with Jordan Jereb, the public face of the ROF, as did ABC News. The Associated Press published further reporting, saying, “Jereb said he didn’t know Cruz personally and that ‘he acted on his own behalf of what he just did and he’s solely responsible for what he just did.” Over the next 24 hours, the shooter’s alleged white nationalist affiliation was amplified by media reports from The Daily Beast, Daily KOS and Fox News.
However, the next day, Lt. Grady Jordan of the Leon County Sheriff’s Office in Tallahassee, where the ROF is based, said there were no known ties between Cruz and the group. The police response led to a swift shift in reporting narratives across the media spectrum, with updates and redactions appearing in online publications on both the left and the right.
In an update on its original report, the ADL said, “Following news reports of the alleged association between Cruz and the Republic of Florida, a member of an alt-right discussion forum wrote that all of the claims were false and were part of an elaborate attempt to troll a network news reporter and other media outlets.”
Storyful’s internal investigation into the disinformation operation identified conversations across TRS504 forums, Discord, Gab, and 4chan alluding to Jereb spreading false background information on suspected shooter Nicholas Cruz. The tactic, which Data & Society researcher Joan Donovan refers to as “source hacking,” involved a number of white nationalists posting fake comments to the shooter’s Instagram page. This led journalists to reach out to the Instagram users purporting to be Cruz’s friends, who directed them to call Jereb.
In addition to the source hacking, ADL researchers identified 4chan posts tying the suspected shooter to the ROF, which they used to further corroborate their own claim about the shooter’s organizational affiliation. Other media outlets picked up this reporting.
When contacted by journalists, Jereb initially corroborated the claim that Cruz was affiliated with the group, but later backtracked after people in white nationalist forums accused him of bringing wrongful attention to their cause. In the 24 hours after the story broke, Jereb made a number of statements about not understanding the journalists’ questions, or having clear or definitive answers.
On his Gab account, he explained, “…Someone called the ROF hotline with questions, And I gave them as honest answers I could give them at the time I called. It really is that simple.There was a legit misunderstanding because we have MULTIPLE people named Nicholas in ROF, And I got a bunch of conflicting information….I’ll do what I think is in the best interests of my volk, And the Republic Of Florida.”
In numerous white nationalist forums, Jereb was accused of “taking it too far” for having run with the ROF affiliation claim and backtracked his claims after being criticized in the aforementioned fringe online spaces.
Before these retractions and statements from local police emerged, Storyful reported to our clients: “We have found no evidence confirming a link between Cruz and the Republic of Florida group.”
When Storyful first read the ADL’s report, we sought to gather as much information as possible about the ROF as quickly as possible. We anticipated that the group’s profiles on social media platforms might be taken down or made private as a result of the attention. We were looking for any evidence that Cruz might have appeared with or interacted with the group, and any new information about the group itself.
The richest source of information was videos posted to the ROF’s YouTube channel, which were made private shortly after the affiliation with Cruz became widely reported. Storyful was able to review dozens of these videos before they went offline.
The videos, posted over two years, largely show Jereb talking to the camera. While some do feature other people, they often appear with their faces masked or blurred. A few of the videos say they show military-inspired training, but no one in those videos can be positively identified as Cruz. The videos also included anti-Semitic songs and footage of the militia’s or Jereb’s guns and other equipment.
Several videos on the channel showed Jereb’s interest in high school students, and we looked at these carefully. In one video, Jereb says he is standing outside a high school, and warns drug dealers not to sell drugs to kids. No school building is visible in the video, which appears to have been filmed in a parking lot. In another video, Jereb makes fun of an anti-racist pamphlet, which warns the ROF is targeting high school students. These videos drew our attention, but did not corroborate an association between Cruz and the ROF.
Like other news organizations, we looked to find Cruz’s online profiles, a search made difficult by the fact that Cruz’s name was spelled multiple ways. It is now clear that his profiles were removed or taken down extremely quickly, eliminating his Internet presence as a source of information for us.
In addition, Storyful looked on closed and semi-closed networks like Discord, 4chan, and other right-wing forums, and saw a number of white nationalists talking about a planned disinformation operation, which started with posting comments to the alleged shooter’s Instagram account.
Their posts caught the attention of journalists and effectively channeled multiple reporters to Jereb.
This likely wasn’t the only disinformation campaign at work about the suspected shooter, Nicholas Cruz, or about the Parkland shooting more broadly.
On the same day we conducted our investigation of Cruz’s connection to the ROF, Storyful performed a network graph analysis of the #nikolascruz hashtag on Twitter, analyzing 11,672 tweets from 7,746 Twitter accounts. The team identified a notable degree of amplification around several right-wing media figures, most notably Laura Loomer, who has previously worked with Project Veritas, which has tried to discredit mainstream media organizations through elaborate undercover schemes.
Other groups like the Hamilton 68 project, which “monitors accounts it has identified as linked to Russian information operations”, also reported that the accounts it monitors focused on the school shooting. Those accounts created an additional layer of disinformation around the shooter’s background and alleged political beliefs. Finally, RohoBot Labs Botcheck.me, a bot-monitoring organization based at Stanford University, reported that a large proportion of the 1,500 suspicious accounts it monitors tweeted a high volume of content related to the Florida shooting the following day.
We have found no evidence linking the campaign, which originated from conversations between American right-wing groups, and ongoing efforts by Russian-based organizations to promote divisive content in the United States and elsewhere.
On February 16, ROF had once again made the videos on its YouTube channel visible, and had posted a new one. It was a repost of a report from The Young Turks about the mistaken reporting on the connection between Cruz and the ROF. The ROF titled its video, “Media trusted the ADL: Big mistake,” and at the end, inserted text saying, “We will not confirm or deny if in fact we baited the ADL…but the fact is, the media blindly trusted the ADL. Maybe next time they will think twice!”
Jereb — or whoever posted the video — has a point. Clearly, the success of the relatively small scale disinformation campaign linking Cruz to the ROF is worrying. It demonstrates the importance of understanding fringe social networks and of corroborating claims through multiple independent channels.
