Experts say chilling videos posted by the couple at the centre of the deadly Queensland shooting have sparked conspiracy theories about the tragedy being a “cover-up” or “false flag” event.
Conspiracists have spent countless hours on encrypted apps and online forums for more than a week, attempting to present an alternative reality of the shooting that left two officers and a neighbour dead.
Several of these theories echo the paranoia and conspiratorial thinking of the shooters – Gareth and Stacey Train and Gareth’s brother Nathaniel, who were later killed in a shootout with police – with some presenting them as victims who “knew too much”.
Some have taken note of Nathaniel’s anger at his former employer, the New South Wales education department, while others have falsely claimed the Trains were killed because the government and gas industry wanted to access their property for fracking.
Elise Thomas, a senior online data analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said when a violent event involves conspiracy theorists, there is regularly an immediate “shying away from the uncomfortable truth”.
“To realise that, actually, some of the people they’ve been communicating with are quite violent and very, very strange people – who they would probably cross the street to avoid in person – I think that is a bit of a shock to the system,” Thomas said.
“These conspiracy theories help explain away that uncomfortable feeling [of] ‘What have I gotten myself into here?’”
Stacey and Gareth Train uploaded a video on the night of the shootings claiming to have killed “demons and devils” on their property. Many of their other videos expressed an intense hatred towards police and include references to evangelical apocalypticism and conspiracy theories.
Despite this, some conspiracists have rejected the video entirely, claiming it is a “deep fake” engineered by state actors and authorities.
Deakin University senior research fellow Dr Josh Roose said the nature of conspiratorial thinking is that everything is folded into a grand conspiracy, with these types of theories taking on a life of their own.
“People will sit there and look at what was said, what was done and will weave that into their own narrative and then spread their narrative. Then someone else will take that narrative and build upon it,” Roose said.
“It gets to the point where there’s no clarity and everything is a conspiracy.”
Roose said conspiracy theorists often attempt to show a type of “alternate truth and mobilise other like-minded actors to work against whatever dominant power they see”.
The researcher said tackling these beliefs can be challenging, particularly when events are subject to investigation and there is an absence of facts about what has occurred.
“Conspiracy theories spread most effectively in a vacuum of information,” Roose said.
“There are limitations on what [authorities] can say with an ongoing investigation, but basic transparency about the process, about what’s going to occur would certainly go at least some of the way in battling the conspiracy theories.”
Thomas said it was extremely challenging to assess whether threatening and extreme rhetoric could translate into real-life violence.
But she said there were red flags in the offline behaviour of the Trains, including claims that Gareth Train had assaulted his wife and reports that Nathaniel Train broke through the New South Wales border carrying weapons last year.
“As weird as what they were posting was, it wasn’t that different and that extreme from what others are posting online,” Thomas said.
“But it seems like there were a lot of layering red flags in their offline lives which should have been picked up on sooner.”
