For three days before police identified the Portuguese man who apparently killed two Brown University undergraduates and an MIT professor, a certain squalid sector of social media was astir with one question: Where is Mustapha Kharbouch? Kharbouch, a Brown undergraduate and Palestinian activist, was floated as a culprit by @0hour1, an anonymous X account with 270,400 followers. Others claimed that Kharbouch was “allegedly, possibly … a suspect” (whatever that means), and amateur forensic podiatrists reported a “97.8% gait match” between Kharbouch and the killer. The Agence France-Presse has a roundup of prominent figures who amplified suspicion of Kharbouch, including the podcaster Tim Pool and the financier Bill Ackman. Brown took down, without explanation, webpages that mentioned Kharbouch, and some said that deletion looked awfully suspicious.
Where was he? Presumably he was busy interviewing libel lawyers, and calculating how much of his Brown tuition could be paid off by suing those who accused him of killing his classmates. Some of his tormentors have gone to their websites and taken down, without explanation, their accusations. Some might say that deletion also looks awfully suspicious, the evidence of a bad conscience and possibly good legal advice.
[Xochitl Gonzalez: America is failing its children]
Other speculation was less damaging, but still wrong. The Morning Meeting’s Mark Halperin relayed a rumor that the killer had targeted Ella Cook, a conservative student and one of the victims. And The Jerusalem Post indicated that Iran might have taken out the MIT physicist, Nuno Loureiro, although now it appears that that was a Portuguese-on-Portuguese murder without geopolitical significance.
The Brown and MIT shootings were unusual because so many days elapsed without any useful images or clues about the killer or his choice of victim. The desperation of the police came across unsettlingly in their press conferences. And just as castaways start nibbling on shoe leather, social media started giving credence to harmful nonsense; even journalists like Halperin reported speculation that they knew had little to support it. (“If I were editing The New York Times, I don’t think I’d put it in the paper,” he said, before airing the rumor and demonstrating the distinction between his own show and The New York Times.) The Jerusalem Post is a good example of media autophagy, the self-consumption of its own apparent speculation.
Hungry mouths demand feeding, and I suppose it is unreasonable to expect total abstention from speculation when there is no more nourishing substance on offer. But we were all in the lifeboat together, and some started consuming their own piss sooner than others. The shootings were so obviously senseless—one theory is that the killer was angry at physics, the discipline from which he’d washed out decades ago, and shot a bunch of intro-to-economics students by accident—that the only lessons to be extracted from the experience are these incidental ones.
Who speculated? Who started the speculation? Who refrained from speculation, and who stayed silent even as the hunger for information became unbearable? Those who consumed all that speculative junk and liked it are beyond hope. Others, who are salvageable, might log off, take a walk, or otherwise forswear digital information. But that is the wrong approach.
[Helen Lewis: MAGA influencers don’t understand what journalism is]
It is better to keep score. Those who speculated wildly have earned eternal blocks from me on social media. To spread rumors without substantiation shows disregard for the object of those rumors, of course. Moreover, it shows indifference to the victims of the shootings. If you care about dead students and professors, you have to care about accurately, rather than indiscriminately, identifying those who killed them. Some speculated more directly than others. The right-wing activist Pamela Geller implied that Kharbouch was a “murdering Muslim.” Another right-wing activist, Laura Loomer, said Brown’s removal of Kharbouch’s webpages was part of “a massive coverup to protect the identity of the shooter.” Another right-wing activist, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harmeet Dhillon, merely called the scrubbing “concerning.” But they all bet some amount of credibility on the relevance of this student to the investigation. And it is important that because they lost that bet, they lose credibility along with it.
Keeping score also means rewarding those who said nothing when they knew nothing. (To my knowledge, no one knew anything. If someone wrote, three days ago, that the Brown massacre “has all the hallmarks of a Lusophone, plasma-physics-related homicide,” then all I can say is Tiro-te o chapéu—I doff my hat to you. Immediate follow.) Most established news organizations, including The New York Times, Fox News, and WPRI, seem to have followed this basic rule, and limited their coverage to relaying their own failure, along with everyone else’s, to come up with any leads. Sometimes eating nothing is the healthiest option. This week was not a bad one for mainstream media.
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