(Washington) A slanderous campaign accusing the newly elected mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani of being linked to the Islamic State (IS) organization was launched on social networks by American far-right influencers generating millions of views.
A self-proclaimed socialist, Muslim, born in Uganda to parents from South-East Asia, Zohran Mamdani, 34, is the constant target of attacks targeting his program and his religion from the far right.
A series of anti-Mamdani accounts on the Elon Musk-owned Platform
Among the influencers who linked this false press release to Mamdani is Laura Loomer, a conservative activist close to Donald Trump.
“Muslims can’t think of a better way to celebrate a Muslim candidate’s victory for mayor today than with an ISIS attack in New York,” Loomer wrote in a post on X that has surpassed 200,000 views.
Other conservative accounts cited this purported statement to falsely claim that the Islamist group supported Mamdani for mayor.
These publications have accumulated millions of views on the platform.
The alleged IS statement reproduced on the networks in a letter displaying the logo of Amaq, the propaganda agency of the Islamic State, is a fake, assured several researchers including the disinformation monitoring group NewsGuard.
Meili Criezis, an academic at American University, told NewsGuard that the statement did not have the usual characteristics of statements coming from Amaq.
“Amaq is used (by ISIS) to share news and claim responsibility for attacks,” the researcher explained. “He is not making threats like those in the screenshot.”
The Information Epidemiology Lab, another research group, also claimed that the statement released “diverged sharply” from ISIS media practices in terms of language, style, format and distribution.
The fabricated statement appears to have first emerged on the far-right forum “4chan”, known for its conspiracy theories and spreading hateful, supremacist or neo-Nazi messages.
