Yesterday, an individual claiming to be part of the Anonymous collective took credit for GoDaddy’s interruption of service. The GoDaddy homepage and its customers’ websites all went down. The problem is: GoDaddy said internal problems caused the shutdown. GoDaddy has everything to gain if they blame Anonymous and they didn’t. So what was at work here?

Disinformation.

Anti-Anonymous individuals, whether operating on their own or perhaps part of the government, are just as clever as Anonymous at manipulating the media. Most Americans won’t think too deeply about or investigate why it makes no sense for Anonymous to DDoS GoDaddy. Anonymous had a legitimate beef with GoDaddy earlier this year when the web hosting company was supporting SOPA (Stop Online Piracy). Following a very public Reddit boycott campaign, though, which called on internet users to migrate their online businesses away from GoDaddy, the company withdrew its support of SOPA. Market forces spoke.

The person behind the Twitter account @AnonymousOwn3r must have known that Anonymous doesn’t currently have a problem with GoDaddy. Perhaps this user is an idiot, but it’s probably more likely that an individual, whether a loner or government agent, used the GoDaddy outage as the perfect opportunity to connect the words “Go Daddy,” “outage” and “Anonymous” in the same sentence. All the person had to do was suggest the connection and the media did the rest of the work. It’s great propaganda.

As @AnonOps tweeted yesterday, the hacker was probably “misguided or trying to give Anons a bad reputation.”

So think for a minute exactly who benefits from spreading the lie.