Facts secondary to overarching plot line as wild speculation about Kirk shooting abounds

New York: The confusion online started almost instantly after Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist, was assassinated in Utah.

Some people falsely claimed they had identified the shooter, posting pictures of a 77-year-old Canadian who was 3058 kilometres 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.

Charlie Kirk’s death was immediately entangled in a miasma of deliberate falsehoods, honest mistakes and half-baked guesswork.Credit: Monique Westermann

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 metastasise into conspiracy theories or even violence.

Many online commentators are skilled at slotting major events into the years-long political narratives they have espoused, currying support for their cause amid tragedy by drawing traffic and attention to their content. After the shooting, right-wing commentators rushed to fit 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 known.

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“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 plot line.”

Some influencers on social media said after 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. (Cernovich did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Accounts on the social platform X had compared images of the man from Utah with photographs of Michael Mallinson, the Canadian who was in Toronto, where he lives, apparently because he bore some resemblance.

Mallinson said he watched with dismay as his old social media posts supporting Democrats were dredged up and recirculated as supposed evidence of his dark political intent. Assigning political blame – even where no evidence yet exists – is, by now, another certainty after tragedy.

“Social media is a machine that runs on takes and scoops,” said Mike Rothschild, an independent journalist and author who studies conspiracy movements. “Nobody has anything but takes, and they’re getting more outlandish as the hours go by because the alternative is to just say nothing. And that doesn’t generate clicks.”

Kash Patel, director of the FBI and a former podcast host, then announced on X – erroneously, it was later revealed – that the police had apprehended another man who was the shooter.

An hour later, Patel clarified that the man was released, implying that the shooter remained at large and unknown to the authorities.

“Our investigation continues,” Patel wrote. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

US President Donald Trump waded into the political fray with a video of his own. He shared his condolences but also blamed the “radical left” for fomenting a climate of rage, despite having no apparent knowledge of the shooter’s motives.

Many of the posts that contain mistakes and falsehoods remained online long after they were proved false. One about Mallinson received more than 3 million views on X despite having a fact-check notice appended to the bottom. Such corrections on X, called Community Notes, are Elon Musk’s preferred solution to the deluge of misinformation on the platform he owns. Studies have shown, though, that nearly all Community Notes are appended after the post has reached almost everyone that it will reach.

On fringe social media websites where far-right agitators congregate, the mix of news and wild speculation stoked outrage to a fevered pitch, Holt said. A similar mix of content is starting to appear on more mainstream websites like X, Holt added, which he said was a sign that ideas once relegated to the margins were finding traction among everyday social media users.

The confusion was also amplified by artificial intelligence tools.

Phoney news websites devoted to generating clickbait content sprang into action, publishing hastily written articles in a bid to rank highly in search engines. Those articles are sometimes written with the help of AI, which can take threadbare information such as the supposed name of a shooter and spit out realistic-sounding news articles.

AI-powered chatbots introduced their own falsehoods and errors. Two deployed on X had sometimes repeated falsehoods or made mistakes in their responses. Grok, an AI chatbot created by xAI, one of Musk’s companies, dismissed footage of Kirk’s killing as “staged satire or a form of sarcasm” in one early post, and named Mallinson as the shooter in another. The day after Kirk’s death, a bot made by Perplexity, another AI company, claimed that he was alive.

What comes next is likewise clear to disinformation researchers who study social media: the claims, fictions and speculations begin to snowball into full-throated conspiracy theories, which are promoted by influencers eager for larger and larger audiences.

RT, the Kremlin-backed news network, was among dozens of accounts suggesting that “unusual gestures” by men standing behind Kirk before the attack – one touching his hat and his ear, another waving his hand – were worthy of deeper scrutiny. “What do the signs mean?” the account questioned ominously.

Roger Stone, a close ally of Trump and a self-proclaimed “dirty trickster”, added his own speculation on X, writing that Kirk was “killed by a skilled shooter in a professional hit either by a nation state, rogue elements of our own government or a terrorist organisation”. He provided no evidence to support the claim, except that he had written a bestselling book about the assassination of former president John F. Kennedy.

The post received more than 1.5 million views.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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