Florida Man Fails Anti-Lockdown Protest by Amber Deane-Johns, Imogen Day and Dylan Winward
3:23am The cursor blinked at Jack as he stared at the empty search bar on the computer screen, hands hovering over the keyboard as he prepared to launch himself into the sea of results his next words would bring up. Protest lockdown Florida he typed, hitting enter with an over dramatic tap to finish off the phrase. The page loaded sluggishly, desperately trying to connect to the website through the next-door neighbour’s WiFi, until one by one the results popped up below the search bar. Jack clicked through several pages, scrolling through countless threads titled in angry capitals with a few too many exclamation marks, protesting the authorities and their fictitious virus. The further from the first page he went, the lower the risk of the protest being discovered and broken up early on by the police.
A thread titled ‘JOIN THE REBELLION. JACKSONVILLE BEACH’ caught Jack’s eye, a refuge from the multitude of exclamation marks in the results above and below. Jacksonville Beach was a short bus ride from his apartment and the short description below seemed legitimate, rather than a thread obviously fabricated by the government to catch protesters breaking lockdown law. Clicking onto the page, Jack scrolled through the few comments that were already there, checking the time and exact place of the protest, before typing his name in the chat box to sign himself up, promising to show up at 3pm later that day. There were only a couple of usernames officially signed up, but many more had liked the original comment on the thread and would probably turn up for the protest anyway. Making sure he’d read all the information he needed, Jack closed the tab and mindlessly entered into the world of conspiracy theories, resigning himself to watching video
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