SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — Anyone doubting the power and danger of false narratives in 2024 America need only have spent a few minutes scrolling on social media platforms in the wake of Saturday's assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump.
Depending where you looked, there were claims that the attack was orchestrated by the White House; by the far-left group Antifa; or it was no assassination attempt at all and had been staged by the Trump campaign itself to cast the former president as a martyr and a hero.
And these weren’t just a handful of posts. One assessment, by the disinformation security company Cyabra, found that the Trump hoax theory had been pushed by fake accounts with a potential reach of nearly 600 million views.
Meanwhile, those who blamed the White House included prominent commentators and some elected officials.
“It came from every source – random knuckleheads, pundits, lawmakers – deciding in the moment they knew exactly what had happened,” wrote USA Today columnist Rex Huppke.
To the 'blame-Biden' crowd, the fact that a would-be assassin had been able to get a clear shot was enough to confirm the “fact” that the White House must have orchestrated the attack; to the 'it-was-staged' side, the near miss and Trump’s fist pump afterwards were all too convenient.
It was as if, in the wake of the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, large groups of Americans had made up their mind within hours of the shots being fired, minus any facts or opportunity for reflection, much less an actual investigation. The New Yorker editor David Remnick called it a “sickening rush of accusation on social media…the crackpot theories that what happened in Pennsylvania was staged, a ‘false-flag operation,’ a ‘fake,’ the fault of the political left, the Democratic Party, and Biden himself.”
It was also dangerous, given the already fraught state of political divisions in the U.S., and repeated recent warnings that extremist groups in the U.S. may resort to violence.
The “staged attack” narrative
Within minutes of the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, unfounded claims were trending on various social media platforms.
Perhaps most prominent was the suggestion that the Trump campaign had somehow planned the shooting, in a hoax staged to boost sympathy for the candidate. Almost immediately after Trump was whisked from the scene, hundreds of thousands of posts reaching millions of views circulated on X claiming the shooting had been “staged,” according to data from the social media platform.
The claims came with no evidence, and many were linked to fake accounts using hashtags including #stagedshooting and #fakeassassination.
A sampling:
X user @jawn, commenting in all-caps: "This is the most staged s*** I've ever seen. An active shooter and Secret Service just allows him to stand back up for a fist up?!”
Also on X, and also in all-caps, @awsten wrote: "Nothing has ever been more staged, pushing off Secret Service who are much stronger than him to put a fist in the air for the cameras. This is not a marvel movie, you are not Iron Man."
Cyabra said its analysis of X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok covered the 10-hour period that followed the shooting – from just after 6:00pm ET Saturday to 4:00am Sunday – and found that the staged shooting claim was the “primary fake narrative,” and that nearly half the accounts promoting the claim were fake profiles.
“What we have seen in the last few hours is very unusual,” Rafi Mendelsohn, a Vice President at Cyabra, told The Cipher Brief. He said that on average, the percentage of fake accounts involved in everyday social media conversations ranges between 4-6%; here it was 45%.
Posts promoting the “staged” theory received over 404,000 engagements with a potential reach of 595 million views, thanks to influencers who shared the theory. To take one example, the authentic X account @BlackKnight10k, which has over 250,000 followers, shared several tweets amplifying the false narrative.
“The activity we are seeing around this specific narrative points to a certain level of sophistication and coordination that is very concerning,” Mendelsohn said.
Blame the Biden Administration
There was also a sea of vitriol and false narratives directed in the other political direction, claiming that the Biden White House must have been behind the attempt on Trump’s life; how else to explain the inability of the Secret Service to find and eliminate the shooter sooner?
Missouri Secretary of State Valentina Gomez posted a video on X saying the security failures were "on purpose,” and that "someone in his security detail is clearly compromised.”
Those theories, and general right-wing anger, were amplified by several sitting politicians.
Georgia Representative Mike Collins posted on X that “Joe Biden sent the orders”; Texas Representative Ronny Jackson accused individuals on the left – without naming any – of being “directly responsible;” and Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, a short-list contender to be Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, posted that the Biden campaign’s rhetoric had “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Bloomberg reported that the Collins, Jackson and Vance posts had been seen by more than 7.3 million views before midnight Saturday.
On Trump's own site, Truth Social, users suggested that Biden or Hillary Clinton had been behind the attack, and that there had been multiple gunmen. Posts on other platforms misidentified the shooter as a “known Antifa extremist”; not only was there no evidence that the suspected shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was a part of that group, but the name and photo used in those posts were later identified as a YouTuber in Italy who quickly denied any involvement in the shooting. One account on X that posted that false name has 1.3 million followers.
The dangers ahead
For those who follow and worry about the dangers of mis- and disinformation, the flurry of false narratives only confirmed their anxieties about this most turbulent of American campaign seasons. As the misinformation spreads, and the political divisions grow, so do the fears of politically motivated violence in the U.S.
“The lethality of the anti-government, anti-authority movement has really increased on both sides, and I think that is showing in this attack,” former FBI Executive Assistant Director Jill Sanborn told The Cipher Brief after the assassination attempt.
Just as the disinformation spirals, content moderation efforts on major social media platforms have been weakened. Social media analysis tools have been shelved by Meta – the parent company of Facebook and Instagram – and others, and several non-profit efforts to track misinformation, such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, have wound down.
"With breaking news, social media and chat platforms often fail or refuse to moderate patently false or misleading stories and posts," Doowan Lee, Chief Strategy Officer at the AI company EdgeTheory and a senior advisor to the Trust in Media Cooperative, told The Cipher Brief.
In March, Lee participated in a Cipher Brief event on trust in U.S. media and information, an event that detailed the difficulties of building that trust and the danger that bogus stories, videos and theories might dominate in the run up to November 5. Of course, neither Lee nor the other participants could have imagined what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday.
"We’ve seen unfounded claims that Biden ordered it or the Trump campaign staged it that have garnered millions of views and shares just within the first few hours," Lee told The Cipher Brief. "As more Americans are purportedly losing trust in mainstream media, more attention and engagements take place on social media platforms. And that’s too big an opportunity for mis/disinformation to propagate rapidly."
More than three months before Election Day, with both parties’ conventions still to come, the collision of disinformation, political division, and Saturday’s violent act have left many people acutely worried about the road ahead.
"In a country where a great many Americans do not believe that their democracy is healthy or particularly functional, and where a large majority of Americans believe that the domestic political opposition is out to destroy that democracy, this is the worst sort of event that can happen in that environment,” said Ian Bremmer, President of the Eurasia Group.
Bremmer added that he was “deeply worried that it presages much more political violence and social instability to come."
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