For 14 hours over the weekend, Sydney university student Ben Cohen was one of the most reviled men on the internet after he was falsely accused of being the knifeman who went on a stabbing rampage in a Sydney shopping centre, killing six people.
The ABC has pieced together how anti-semitic and pro-Kremlin accounts turned Mr Cohen into an internet villain.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan says deepfake audio of him supposedly making inflammatory remarks before Armistice Day almost caused "serious disorder"
The man who first posted the clip, tracked down by the BBC, told us: "It's what we all know Sadiq thinks."
Tate, the British-American former kickboxer who has 8.7 million followers on the social media platform X, is facing charges in Romania, which he denies, of human trafficking, rape and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women. He has talked about hitting and choking women and has said he is “absolutely a misogynist”.
The bestselling author and Canadian academic, Jordan Peterson, is also seen favourably by 32% of 16 to 29-year-old men, compared with 12% among women of the same generation. Peterson speaks up for “demoralised young men” and says Tate offers “forthright aggression” as an alternative to “cringing defeat”.
Russell Brand was once considered a "hero of the left," criticizing Fox News and corporate media for their sensational and fear-driven coverage.
Now, he's gone full conspiracy theorist, buddying up with the same right-wingers he used to criticize.
His evolution is a great example of "grift drift" -- how so-called "free thinkers" get pulled towards extremism in order to get views and make money.
YouTube has culled a number of big channels promoting Andrew Tate’s online business academy The Real World, following a VICE News investigation revealing how the scheme has been using social media platforms to exploit his young fans.
Shayan Sardarizadeh is a senior journalist covering disinformation, extremism and conspiracy theories for BBC Monitoring’s disinformation team as part of BBC Verify. Since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, he’s debunked dozens of misleading visuals on social media and published his findings on widely read threads on Twitter, now known as X.
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