As President Donald Trump struggles to contain the fallout related to his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, some of his own supporters have decided only one conspiracy theory could possibly explain what’s going on. Welcome to the era of the “false flag.”
Almost every news development is now labeled a “false flag,” or a distraction designed to deflect attention from the real story, by some conspiracy theorist online. “All these floods popping up around the country is a false flag,” an anonymous X account which posts far-right content wrote on July 10. “They want us to forget Epstein!”
False-flag conspiracy theories have been around for decades, long before the emergence of the internet—and like many conspiratorial prisms, they’re rooted in something real, in this case the fact that militaries and intelligence services have staged attacks in order to give pretexts for war. But the volume of social media posts mentioning “false flags” is now at an unprecedented high, according to new research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) shared exclusively with WIRED. Basically, according to the conspiratorial corners of the internet, everything is a false flag now.
“False-flag attacks in the form of severe and unprecedented flooding are currently being carried out across the country as a diversion from Trump spiking the Epstein files,” Stew Peters, a podcaster with a long history of promoting antisemitism and conspiracy theories, wrote on X, alongside a video of actual flooding in North Carolina.
“I didn’t need ChatGPT to tell me it was a falseflag assassination,” RC DeWinter, an artist with 70,000 followers, on X wrote on the anniversary of the Trump assassination attempt.
“Everything you are watching on TV is a false flag, especially the nonsense about Elon Musk & Trump spat,” another X user wrote last week, referencing the fallout between the president and the richest man in the world.
Data from ISD shows that over the past five years, false-flag claims have increased by more than 1,100 percent on X, and the situation is getting increasingly worse. There were 1 million mentions of “false flag” on X between April 26 and June 26, 2025, a nearly 350 percent increase compared to the prior two months.
“It’s unprecedented in terms of the volume, the speed at which it spread, and the level of engagement that we saw. Some of these accounts were not that big, and yet they were garnering millions of views in a matter of hours,” Valeria de la Fuente Suárez, a digital research analyst with ISD and author of the research, tells WIRED. “It’s just becoming this common response to these high-profile crises when there’s chaos and confusion and uncertainty and, in many cases, it doesn’t align with their agenda.”
De la Fuente Suárez says the institute’s research focused on X but adds that she was also able to find many examples of “false flag” conspiracizing on other platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.
X, TikTok, and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
False-flag operations, which are carried out by governments or militaries in an effort to blame an adversary for something they did not actually do, have a rich history. In one of the most famous examples, German soldiers pretended that Polish troops had stormed across the Poland-Germany border in 1939 and taken over a German radio station. The next day, Germany invaded Poland—and Adolf Hitler referenced the previous day’s fake attack in order to legitimize the incursion.
But for as much as real false-flag incidents have occurred, conspiracy theorists have used these histories as a way of legitimizing false-flag conspiracy theories. Major incidents, including the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the September 11 attacks, and the Sandy Hook school shooting, are framed by conspiracy theorists as false flags. Today, after any major incident—whether it’s the attempted assassination of Trump last year, the devastating Texas flooding this month, or the shooting of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman in June—people on the right and left now regularly respond by claiming they are simply distractions.
“Vance Boelter is not a real person,” one X account holder posted about the charged Minnesota shooter. “This is a false flag psyop that the news media is using to instill fear into the people.”
In her report, de la Fuente Suárez outlines a number of reasons why these conspiracy theories have flourished online, including the collapse in trust of mainstream media and public institutions, social media platforms abandoning fact-checking, and the rise in popularity of so-called “news influencers” like Peters. “It creates the sense that nothing can be trusted, that all we read, we see, we hear, on TV, on the news, it’s part of this deception,” de la Fuente Suárez says. “But one of the things that concerns me the most is that within these frameworks, those that are harmed in these attacks are also dehumanized. They are depicted not as victims of attacks, but as these elements of a grand staged plan of deception, downplaying acts of violence and the suffering of the victims in it.”
De la Fuente Suárez says that antisemitism is also driving false-flag conspiracies to an unprecedented level.
Antisemitic posts were among the main drivers of the most recent spike in false-flag conspiracies on X. This began, she says, in response to the shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers who were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, on May 21. Less than two weeks later, a man in Boulder, Colorado, allegedly used incendiary devices to attack participants in a march held to support Israeli hostages in Gaza.
“False Flag 100%,” a conspiracy-focused X account posted two days after the DC shooting. The post was accompanied by a video of the immediate aftermath of the shooting and has been viewed 3.6 million times to date.
In the aftermath of the Boulder attack, an X account that describes its author as an “anti-zionist Jew” posted an image of the suspected attacker with the caption: “This man is an Israeli agent who has just perpetrated a false flag event in Boulder Colorado.” The post has been viewed over 2.2 millions times.
“Antisemitism is at the center of these conspiracy claims, so they resonate more, and in these moments, it’s just an easy response and one that is, in many cases, very difficult to debunk,” says de la Fuente Suárez.
Other experts see the rise in false-flag conspiracy theories as a reflection of the increasingly fractured political environment.
“The rise in false-flag conspiracy theories is closely tied to the political climate,” Pradeep Krishnan, an expert in conspiracy theory and communication at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, tells WIRED. “The Trump presidency has mainstreamed conspiracist rhetoric to mobilize political distrust and promote antiestablishment sentiment.”