A user named Abuaisha10 posted a message on a Muslim forum this week, asking his “brothers and sisters” to wage war against an evil and corrupt West.
But the message may not be all it appears to be, as admins on the site quickly determined that the IP address of the user traced back to The Daily Mail, a right wing UK paper that often publishes controversial anti-Muslim sentiment.
The determination by many is that the comment was posted in order to incite hateful comments by Muslim extremists which could then be used in an article aimed to isolate the Muslim community – something which many have believed The Daily Mail to be guilty of in the past.
Others have countered with the belief that the comment was used in a more elaborate scheme to discredit The Daily Mail, setting the newspaper up. The user Abuaisha10 was a new member who made only the one comment, whose IP address was apparently not masked at all, making it a suspicious comment from the outset and creating a bread crumb trail leading straight back to The Daily Mail that was perhaps a little too easy to follow.
The user and thread have since been deleted, meaning we may never know the truth, and highlighting how inherently difficult it is to prove anything in the digital world of cyberspace.
What do you think happened? A clumsy attempt of entrapment from a tabloid paper, or a scheme to discredit them?
