In the outpouring of grief immediately after the recent shooting at a school in Uvalde, Texas, reports emerged on Twitter and other social media platforms about a man named “Bernie”. He was a teacher at Robb Elementary School who died while protecting his students from gunfire, the reports said. Many of the posts contain a photo of a grinning, bearded man wearing glasses.
Some commentators said they had seen that face and name before.
On that point they were right. “Bernie” and the photo had previously appeared on a number of Twitter accounts that looked as if they were from news organizations such as CNN, Fox News and the BBC. One of those accounts said the man was a journalist who was executed by the Taliban in Kabul. A second said he was an activist killed in Ukraine by a mine planted by Russian-backed separatists. A third said he was killed in last month’s massacre at a Buffalo supermarket.
For those prone to conspiracy theories, the conclusion was clear: “Bernie” was a so-called crisis actor, employed by the left to generate sympathy for things like gun control. His repeated appearances have been used to support theories that major tragedies were deception and that the mainstream media was complicit.
The conspiracy theorists were wrong on all these counts. There is no ‘Bernie’, he is not a crisis actor and news organizations are not behind the reports. And the picture? It belongs to a 36-year-old online gamer, Jordie Jordan. He’s alive, and he had nothing to do with the posts.
Instead, the messages are part of a years-long campaign of intimidation against him, taking place on online platforms such as Twitter, Reddit and Discord. The posts have spread false information about high-profile tragedies over time, much to the delight of many of those who share the joke.
“I have nothing to do with it,” Mr. Jordan said in a video call. “They just take a picture that I put on the internet, and they put me in everything.”
According to an analysis conducted last week by media insights company Zignal Labs, “Bernie” — the full version sounds like a racist slur when spoken out loud — has appeared on Twitter more than 8,700 times. The name has been mentioned more than 1,200 times on Twitter since the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings, an increase of nearly 6,000 percent from the previous two weeks, according to Zignal Labs.
The harassment appears to have started as a racist inside joke at the expense of Mr. Jordan. As the campaign has continued, misinformation researchers say, it has shown how mass shootings and other tragedies have become entertainment for a certain subset of the online world — an opportunity to sow confusion and then enjoy it. The initial trolling reports sometimes fuel rumors that the massacres are false flag operations or staged propaganda events performed by actors.
The falsehoods add to the trauma of the survivors and the families of the victims, and erode the memories of their loved ones. At times, as was the case after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., the untruths led to intimidation from conspiracy theorists.
“It dehumanizes the events, the consequences of shootings and makes fun of it,” said Whitney Phillips, a former disinformation researcher.
Jordan, who streams himself playing video games on YouTube under the name Wings of Redemption, has nearly 440,000 subscribers. He started playing Call of Duty to an online audience in 2008 after he lost a job at a steel mill. Before that, he appeared regularly on a podcast, where he received criticism for his statements, including some homophobic and racist comments, and comments in support of lowering the age of consent. “I have apologized profusely for the mistake of my youthful thought process and live with the consequences of it every day,” he said, attributing the comments to his “shock jock” routine.
He said he first heard of the “Bernie” meme from Reddit posts in 2020. The photo used is a selfie he took on his porch in 2018 and posted it on Twitter.
He said he was initially barely bothered by the campaign, calling it “such a small thing” compared to the multiple times he’s been subjected to more dangerous trolling, including so-called swatting pranks, where people call hoax phones places to reporting false crimes in an effort to compel a response from law enforcement.
Jordan said he believed he first became the target of serious trolling in 2018, after raising tens of thousands of dollars from followers to undergo weight-loss surgery and then dragging his feet before undergoing the procedure. Photos he posted from a hospital bed as proof that he had completed the surgery were later used in false reports of “Bernie’s” death.
In online chat rooms and live streams, other gamers have suggested that the harassment started earlier, following Mr. Jordan’s expressions of frustration and abusive comments during gaming sessions and podcast episodes.
“I think this gives them a form of power,” he said of the people posting his photo, often under accounts meant to look like they’re from news organizations. “Fooling around with someone or making someone feel bad, or saying it’s just horrible what they’re so desensitized to, that makes them feel like they belong.”
But what happens next is the even more insidious danger, Ms Phillips said: The joke is taken on the face of it by the sizable portion of people who are already ready to mistrust the institutions of society.
“It just exacerbates all the conspiratorial stuff we have and puts us on a dangerous course,” she said. “It further impairs our ability to be grounded in the same empirical reality.”
Such jokes have a long historical precedent, researchers say. A man, a comedian, has been falsely named as the gunman in several mass murders, including a 2015 San Bernardino, California shooting.
“I don’t think you can find an event of significant magnitude where it doesn’t happen in the aftermath — it’s almost a reflex right now,” said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington. “Today, people are promoting false flag and crisis actor theories 20 minutes after the event, and in very formulaic ways.”
Mr Caulfield described the cycle as “almost factory production running like clockwork”.
In Mr. Jordan’s case, his photo has resurfaced in social media posts from accounts mimicking news channels and even copying their logos. A report last year that “Bernie” had been executed by Taliban soldiers in Kabul was posted to Twitter from @CNNAfghan, a fake account that Twitter had suspended, and then amplified by @BBCAfghanNews, another suspended account, that “multiple reports ” of death.
“Bernie” has also been described as a victim of a 2021 Kentucky tornado and an explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, in 2020. @FoxNewsUkraine, a fake account with 17 followers that has also been suspended, claimed this year that he was “a right-wing journalist” who was killed in Mariupol, while @RussiaCnn, who has two followers, said he was a pilot who had been shot while flying to Russia.
@CnnZim, in his only post, said “Bernie” was a journalist caught in the crossfire between Russian and Ukrainian troops. The account, which has no followers, describes itself in its profile as a ‘fake account’ and adds: ‘May be removed later to prove how easy it is to cheat people’. Several responses to the post rebuked CNN, which is not affiliated with any of the fake accounts, for flawed journalism.
In response to a question from The New York Times, Twitter said in a statement that it had suspended most accounts for violating its policy against misleading and deceptive identities.
“In accordance with our abuse policy, we prohibit content that denies that mass murder or other mass victimization events took place, where we can verify that the event took place, and when the content is shared with abusive intent,” Twitter said.
George Galloway, a former Member of Parliament who hosted a program called “The Mother of All Talk Shows” on Russian news channel Sputnik, falsely said on air in February that “Bernie’s” online appearances were an example of disinformation. disseminated by the mainstream media. As evidence, Mr Galloway quoted a tweet from an account called CNN Ukraine, who posted the photo and described “Bernie” as “the first US victim of the Ukraine crisis.” The account, which is not affiliated with CNN, has been suspended.
“None of the liars who lied, the sewers who bore their lies, all the poor idiots who believed it all – none of them will suffer any consequences,” thundered Mr Galloway. The show is now streamed from his YouTube account, which has nearly 200,000 subscribers.
He said in a direct message on Twitter last week that it was an “honest mistake in a fast-moving live show” and that he was “genuine regret” and apologized on the night of the broadcast.
Around the same time, Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s representative to the United Nations, used two reports of “Bernie” from fake CNN accounts to criticize the mainstream media.
Colleagues, beware, the main battle is not in #Ukraine, it is with lies and fakes from MSM,” Mr. Polyanskiy wrote on Twitter† CNN later debunked its claims, noting that “the ‘CNN Ukraine’ and ‘CNN Afghanistan’ accounts behind the tweets are both fake and have been suspended by Twitter for violating its anti-impersonation policy.”
Asked about the mail this week, Mr. Polyanskiy in a direct message said he’d forgotten about it in the three months since he posted it and had “no idea” who “Bernie” was.
“But if you’re suggesting that I’ve criticized MSM incorrectly and because of these false accounts my criticism is not credible, I will disagree,” he wrote.
