Jeffrey Epstein’s death on Aug. 10, 2019, sparked a flurry of conspiracy theories, and the release of Epstein’s purported suicide note on May 6, 2026, is a good bet to be fodder for more.
But Epstein’s death is only one facet of the convicted sex offender’s story to spawn and sustain conspiracy theories.
The Department of Justice has released more than 3 million publicly available documents related to the shadowy sex-trafficking networks surrounding Epstein. Journalists and researchers are working to make sense of the massive trove of data, but it is going slowly, and the interface built by the Department of Justice to the documents is unwieldy.
In response, some Americans have taken it upon themselves to dive into the archive. They are using artificial intelligence to develop platforms to make navigating the Epstein files easier and to conjure up new assessments of all the information.
As a scholar of online conspiratorial activity, I’m seeing that these tools are also helping conspiracy theorists craft their narratives.
Do-it-yourself conspiracy platforms
Because the Epstein files are a massive, unstructured dataset made up of PDF files, videos, photographs and other materials, these platforms make it easier for people to see connections where none exist.
Some of the platforms are intentionally masquerading as neutral, data-driven AI research tools but are actually designed by conspiracy theorists to encourage and amplify conspiracy thinking, leading to what I call “platform conspiracism.”
Epstein conspiracy theories often follow a classic logical fallacy known as “post hoc ergo propter hoc” — assuming that because event A happened before event B, event A must have caused event B. For example, in 2017, QAnon participants claimed that there was a secret cabal of satanic pedophiles trafficking children, so by this faulty logic, the subsequent Epstein revelations must be evidence that QAnon was right.
Some Epstein platform operators are supplementing their thinking with ideas from QAnon and other online conspiracy movements about cannibalism, satanism or the CIA’s experiments with mind control in the 1950s known as MK Ultra.
The platform conspiracists have a ready audience because many Americans are concerned about the vast tentacles of Epstein affiliates reaching into government, entertainment, academia and the tech industry. And of course many people simply want to know who is in the files and why. The unintended, or in some cases intended, consequences are that the do-it-yourself conspiracy platforms encourage paranoia and conspiracism.
Each time the Department of Justice releases or tries to not release a new crop of documents, it sparks widespread interest. Social media influencers, for example, immediately share videos of their own interpretations of the files.
Conspiracy masquerading as data analysis
One platform, called the WEBB, promises to use AI for “document intelligence” that…
