Different tragedies, same malicious narrative

Immediately following the terrorist attack on Bondi beach in Sydney, Social media was flooded with stories surrounding the attack. One narrative which received especially high reach and engagement was the claim that one of the attackers' names spiked on google search in Israel and Australia, before the attack even took place. 

This false claim, supported by doctored Google search screenshots, suggests that Israeli and Australian authorities were aware of the attack and chose not to stop it, or even worse, planned it. 

False-flag narratives are a hallmark of FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference)., but this specific “spike in search” narrative felt familiar for us, so we digged in a bit deeper   

Bondi Beach 

The first instance of this claim detected by our platfrom came from X user Hidden_Archievz a small account who maintains a presence across various social media profiles.

The post was quickly picked up by major X influencer Sulaiman Ahmed (who quoted hidden archievz as the source of the claim in his comments), where it received over 2.2 million views, and 3.4k shares. The claim that continued to spread, we detected hundreds of instances and variations of this claim, receiving millions of views overall.

We knew we saw this narrative before in other investigations, so we ran a similar narrative analysis across other use cases. This narrative was familiar from prior investigations, prompting us to conduct a similar analysis of the narrative across additional use cases.We found out that this is not the first (or even the 2nd!) time that this narrative has been pushed over the last few months. Brinker’s platform detected multiple variations of this narrative in connection with different assassinations and attacks

Charlie Kirk’s murder

Charlie Kirk’s murder on September 10th also sparked a wave of misinformation online. Once the name of Kirk’s killer went public, users started to claim that the shooter’s name and address were searched on google before the shooting. Some users claimed that searches for the shooter spiked in May, months before the shooting happened. Again supported with screenshots of trend graphs to amplify believability.  

US DC National Guard Shooting

Immediately following the attack on US National guardsmen in Washington DC on November 26th,users online claimed that the shooter's name was heavily searched in both Washington DC and Israel prior to the attack, with some users claiming that this was proof of a combined CIA and Mossad false flag operation.

These "search spikes" narratives were repeatedly spread and proved to be highly shareable. Claims were framed as statistical, irrefutable, and contained graphs, leaving no room for objectivity for viewers, requiring them to conduct additional research. Furthermore, these types of narratives shift the blame from the attackers onto the victims and aim to create chaos and distrust in the aftermath of horrifying events. 

Based on the above findings, and other similar instances,  it is our recommendation to monitor for this Google spike narrative shortly after terrorist attacks and hate crimes to identify its onset and the malicious actors perpetrating it.