Fact check: False claim Edward Snowden exposed HAARP ‘assassination agenda’

Isabella Fertel, USA TODAY
·3 min read
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The claim: Edward Snowden exposed HAARP’s ‘global assassination agenda’

A Feb. 1 Facebook post (direct link, archived link) includes a video showing someone scrolling through an online article about former U.S. security contractor Edward Snowden.

“Snowden reveals HAARP’s GLOBAL Assassination agenda,” reads both the headline of the article and the caption of the post.

The video appears to originate from a Telegram channel called “END ILLUMINATI.”

The same video was posted by other users on multiple social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter. The videos have been viewed more than 29,000 times on Facebook.

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Our rating: False

The article featured in the video comes from a satirical news website. Snowden has not released any kind of documentation of an assassination agenda associated with the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, also known as HAARP.

Article shown in video comes from satirical news site

The article shown in the videos was published on a website called the Internet Chronicle in 2013.

James Galloway, editor of the Internet Chronicle, confirmed in an email that the website is satirical in nature and described the article as a “joke.”

While the website’s about page does not explicitly state that its content is satirical, the content as well as descriptions of the publication and its editors are clearly satirical in nature.

Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency, fled the U.S. after he leaked information on the nation's most secretive spy agencies and their programs in 2013. His actions triggered a debate over government surveillance, with some hailing him as a hero and others calling him a traitor.

Several other “articles” on the site purport that Snowden has unveiled other sorts of nefarious undercover government plots.

Researchers at HAARP utilize an array of high-frequency transmitters to conduct various experiments in the upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere. There is no evidence that the research program has a “global assassination agenda.”

The posts are examples of what could be called "stolen satire," where screenshots of stories written as satire and presented that way originally are reshared in a way that makes them appear to be legitimate news. As a result, readers of the second-generation post are misled, as was the case here.

USA TODAY has previously debunked claims that HAARP can manipulate the weather and create earthquakes.

Fact check: High-frequency research program studies ionosphere, can't create hurricanes

USA TODAY reached out to the social media users who shared the video for comment.

Reuters also debunked this claim.

Our fact-check sources:

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: False claim Snowden revealed HAARP 'assassination agenda'