Warning: I keep hearing people mix up the term 'false flag' with any staged event.

I was reading a thread here last week where someone called a prank video a false flag. That's not right. A false flag is a very specific thing where a group does something bad but makes it look like their enemy did it, to start a war or get support. I learned this from a college history class in 2002, when we studied the Gleiwitz incident before World War II. Now, people use it for any hoax or lie they see online. It matters because when we water down the real meaning, we lose the power to talk about the actual, scary times it has happened. Using it wrong makes the whole conversation fuzzy. Has anyone else seen this shift in how the word gets used?

2 comments

2 Comments

blakeallen9d ago

Wait, you learned about the Gleiwitz incident in a class back in 2002? That's wild, I thought that stuff was way more niche until the internet got big. You're totally right about the meaning getting wrecked though. Now it just gets slapped on any weird video or political stunt, which makes talking about real covert ops impossible. It feels like we lost a useful word for describing a real kind of attack.

dakotaknight9d ago

Actually learned about it earlier, around '98. Teacher was a history buff. The meaning drift is a real shame, makes specific conversations harder.