'False flag' conspiracies about the Uvalde and Buffalo mass shootings are already big on the far-right

• Far-right conspiracists have spread false claims that the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings were hoaxes.
• False flag claims are often used to push against gun control or frame incidents as government plots.

Almost immediately after news broke of the deadly mass shootings this month in Buffalo and Uvalde, far-right extremists and QAnon influencers began spreading false claims that these killings were a hoax. The reaction has become common among conspiracy theorists, who have repeatedly taken tragedies and distorted them to fit their extremist narratives.

The day of the Buffalo shooting on May 14, when a white supremacist killed 10 people at a supermarket, one prominent QAnon influencer told his 84,000 followers on Telegram that the incident was a false flag operation. Following the shooting last week at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in which 21 people including 19 children died, the same influencer reiterated his claims that the killing was a false flag. Another prolific, anti-Semitic QAnon conspiracist claimed that "false flag shootings abound" on the day of the Uvalde killings.

These baseless conspiracy theories circulated so widely in some online circles that fact-checkers needed to debunk the blatantly false claims.

Regardless of the amount of genuine video and photo evidence circulating, false flag claims now spread after every shooting. Experts told Insider these sorts of baseless conspiracy theories have started spreading easier and quicker across social media platforms in the last few years. They're being used by conspiracists to push back against gun control laws and frame tragedies as nefarious government plots against citizens, aligning with other far-right conspiracies like QAnon.

Sara Aniano, a disinformation and extremism researcher, told Insider she's seen a number of wild false flag accusations. Some of them echo false claims spread after previous tragedies, such as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, where far-right conspiracists accused parents of victims of being crisis actors. Far-right and conspiracist communities have also spread false flag accusations about numerous incidents besides shootings, including everything from the September 11 terrorist attacks to the Capitol Riot in January 2021.

Aniano said the far-right's prevailing theory is that these recent shootings were false flags – incidents blamed on one entity when actually perpetrated by another – or government psy-ops "orchestrated intentionally by the FBI or CIA" to support gun control.

Aniano said one worrisome component of these newer false flag theories is that some of the believers think everyone involved isn't a crisis actor, and some people did die in these attacks. Conspiracists promoting these allegations have shifted the narrative because it's easier for their followers to believe that children actually died than that they were all crisis actors, Aniano said.

"They just don't believe the shooting was done organically," Aniano said. "The narrative there is that the government is deliberately killing children in order to push gun control laws."

Far-right conspiracist and InfoWars host Alex Jones has also lost numerous defamation suits from parents of Sandy Hook victims in recent years, after he falsely claimed their children were not killed in the shooting and that crisis actors were used.

Jared Holt, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab, told Insider he's also seen false flag accusations circulating following the shootings this month, including one trying to connect the shootings with the upcoming US midterms "as a way to make Republicans look bad."

False flag theories serve multiple purposes for believers, Holt said. They can create "cognitive distance" between the tragedy and the adherent's own ideologies, and they can be used to validate pre-existing conspiracy theories that people may already believe.

Many other far-right conspiracy theories, including QAnon, revolve around the idea that a shadowy group of global elites is pulling the strings behind the scenes or orchestrating events. Claims of false flag attacks easily fit into those narratives, giving conspiracists an easy framework for convincing followers that new shootings or attacks are part of those broader conspiracies.

Holt said one shift with the spread of baseless claims like the false flag conspiracy theories nowadays is how they're disseminated and manufactured.

"Not so long ago, people were turning to radio hosts or specific bloggers to get that kind of material," Holt said. "In the modern internet, anyone can post anything and take their shot at trying to go viral, or they can sort of crowdsource the theory."

Online conspiracy theory communities now have an immediate reflex to push out accusations into the broader discourse as they expand on each other's claims and reinforce their beliefs, Holt said.

"You can kind of watch these things get built in real-time in these communities as people chat back and forth," Holt said. "There's a communal aspect that bonds people who believe in theories like this."