The confusion online started almost instantly after Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist, was assassinated in Utah on Wednesday.
Some people falsely claimed they had identified the shooter, posting pictures of a 77-year-old Canadian who was 1,900 miles away, in Toronto, at the time. Other users posted photographs of a transgender woman, falsely claiming she was the shooter. Some accounts said that only a right-wing marksman could carry out such a long-range shot, despite no evidence of the person’s motives or methods. Many suggested the killer was liberal; others floated the prospect that it was a targeted killing by a foreign actor.
On and on it went.
Mr. Kirk’s death was immediately entangled in a miasma of deliberate falsehoods, honest mistakes and half-baked guesswork that has clouded the online environment after nearly every tragedy. The drumbeat of errors — now darkly familiar — has become a grim companion to America’s grief, trailing major events with the constant threat that they will metastasize into conspiracy theories or even violence.
Many online commentators are skilled at slotting major events into the yearslong political narratives they have espoused, currying support to their cause amid tragedy by drawing traffic and attention to their content. After the shooting, right-wing commentators rushed to fit Mr. Kirk’s killing into a long-running narrative that left-leaning Americans are not just wrong, but also inherently violent, before any motive for the shooting was yet known.
“They’re telling conservative audiences that the left is totally radical, it’s violent, and they want you dead,” said Jared Holt, a researcher at Open Measures, a company that monitors influence operations online. “And when something like this happens, all of that stuff comes back out. The facts of what happened are really kind of secondary to the overarching plotline.”
Some influencers on social media said after Mr. Kirk’s killing that the shooter was left-wing. One right-wing influencer, Mike Cernovich, pushed the idea further, saying in a post that the shooter was “an ideological foot soldier of far left wing billionaires.” They reposted videos of police officers detaining an older white man at the scene, though the police said within hours at a news conference that the man was not the shooter. (Mr. Cernovich did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
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The post With Few Facts About Kirk Shooting, Wild Speculation Abounds appeared first on New York Times.
