R
ecently a hoax appeared online claiming that Chris Harper-Mercer had an Isis Battle flag in one of his pictures. Several groups reposted the image before researching and eventually “bare naked Islam” picked it up. Either they or the original poster then photoshopped a review online where an IronCross45 purchased a Nazi/SS Hat. They replaced the hat with an ISIS battle flag and then claimed Harper-Mercer reviewed it online. This is an elaborate hoax that took some clever photoshopping.
Cai Irvin and the author of this article (Hannibal) wanted to discover where this came from. Cai Irvin tracked the image back as far as possible and located it on a page called “Silence is Consent”. At the time of writing this article they had close to 100,000 people. We would highly recommend the moderators of that page determine who wrote this and why, and then remove them from the page.
Compare Images
The picture above is the original picture. Notice there is no flag on the bottom left of the image. The picture on the right is the first photoshopped image we can find with the ISIS Battle flag.
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This is a big deal
This isn’t a simple mistake, this is an elaborate scheme. The original poster intentionally and deliberately Photoshopped an image into a photo. They are fabricating evidence involved in a horrific tragedy to support their opinion. That is called propaganda, and when one plays this game with a national tragedy you have to question their credibility, ethics, and morality.
This is also extremely counter productive for the people that support any of these pages. It could be considered sabotage. Just one of these posts causes significant damage to the credibility of the page posting it. It can even possibly damage the credibility of the people participating in the debate/conversation on the same pages. One of these posts will cause more bad than hundreds of factual posts will cause good.
Who would do such a thing? What does that say for their morality, credibility, and ethics? Were they just trying to influence opinion or is there something more sinister here? Could it be a case of sabotage?
This hoax fooled thousands of people, it also caused unnecessary drama between several groups and people. Spreading photoshopped images onto various pages you’re a member of is not helping that cause whatsoever, but maybe that’s the desired intent. In the pursuit of credibility, the original person who photoshopped these images should be exposed and then outed from any page they are a moderator of.
