Members of the Republican party have joined internet cranks in promoting fake news and disinformation about the shooting at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday (Picture: Reuters/AP)
The words ‘staged’, ‘deep state’ and ‘antifa’ have swiftly become trending topics this morning on X in the aftermath of yesterday’s assassination attempt on presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Outlandish conspiracy theories, such as rumours surrounding the disappearance of Kate Middleton from public life earlier this year, have become a mainstay of X since Elon Musk’s takeover and rebranding of the social media platform last October.
Critics say Musk’s decision to strip content moderation to the bone has created a forum that actively promotes disinformation about global events and crises, from the US presidential election to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
Among the public figures using the platform to push questionable accounts of yesterday’s events are Republican congressional representatives Mike Collins and Marjorie Taylor Greene, as well as Senator Tim Scott.
Collins has said ‘Joe Biden sent the orders’ and called for the incumbent president to face charges for ‘inciting an assassination’, with Taylor Greene adding that Democrats have ‘wanted Trump gone for years and they’re prepared to do anything to make that happen.’
Scott, meanwhile, who has been touted as a potential Trump running mate, has said the shooting was ‘aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media’, with Nicole Shanahan, who serves as Trump opponent Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s running mate, blaming the Democrats and ‘legacy media’ for inciting the violence – despite her previous criticisms of Trump as a candidate.
In response to a variety of posts claiming Trump’s protective unit were slow to respond to the threat yesterday, Musk himself has posted that ‘the head of the Secret Service and the leader of this security detail should resign’, later adding ‘extreme incompetence or it was deliberate. Either way, the SS leadership must resign.’
Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has come under repeated fire for failures to regulate disinformation on X, has claimed the ‘SS Leadership’ must resign over the Secret Service’s supposed mishandling of the shooting yesterday (Picture: Getty)
Prominent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was previously ordered to pay out $1.5 billion (£1.2 billion) for spreading disinformation about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, has encouraged Musk to ‘get to your bunker’ amid what he’s described as a ‘live coup’ by the ‘Deep State.’
A supposed shadow government made up of secret power networks, the Deep State has featured prominently in Jones’ disinformation campaigns, peddled to followers from his fake news website InfoWars.
So too has the US left-wing, anti-racist political movement Antifa, which has grown substantially in influence and membership following Trump’s electoral victory in 2016, and whose members have in recent years shown willingness to employ violence in pursuit of their aims.
In a characteristically agitated video posted to X that has since garnered more than five million views, Jones said: ‘I have told you for months on air that they’re trying to kill Trump. And when they try to kill Trump they’re going to go after everybody else that is his top supporters.
Republican Congressman Mike Collins has made the outlandish claim that Biden ordered a hit on Trump (Picture: Reuters)
‘They also will try to kill Biden, and blame it on a Trump supporter. That’s coming next.
‘Make no mistake, the same Deep State that’s behind Biden [and] trying to make him step down was behind this today. They’re now reporting it was an Antifa shooter who’s now been killed.’
No credible media outlets have made any association whatsoever between the far-left organisation and Thomas Matthew Crooks, whom federal authorities have identified as the shooter at yesterday’s rally.
Early reports in fact indicate Crooks was a registered Republican voter, with no previous criminal history.
Other accounts have pushed Jones’ Antifa theory further, wrongfully claiming that Mark Violets, a prominent member of the movement, was not only the shooter but had discussed his plan and motives in a video posted to YouTube.
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a known advocate of the QAnon conspiracy theory, has similarly said the Democratic Party was behind the attempted shooting (Picture: AP)
The stills purportedly from that video which were shared with these posts featured the image of an entirely different person, who has not been identified and in any case appears to have had nothing to do with yesterday’s shooting.
After these initial narratives had been comprehensively discredited, other users took up the line that the false identification of Violets as the culprit had in fact originated from the police department in Butler, Pennsylvania, where the shooting took place.
One popular X account, Wall Street Silver, made these fake claims to its approximately 1.3 million voters before subsequently deleting the post, which in the meantime was nevertheless circulated by various accounts linked to Russian propaganda efforts on the platform.
Alex Jones is a known disinformation-merchant, having previously been ordered to pay out $1.5 billion to victims of the Sandy Hook shooting after he’d promoted false claims about the incident (Picture: AP)
Other users known to have previously shared content relating to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which falsely claims that the Democratic Party is itself part of a worldwide Satanic organisation engaged in the sex trafficking of children, have put out further posts suggesting prominent Democrats had colluded with the CIA on yesterday’s assassination attempt.
However, not all of the now rapidly-spreading misinformation about yesterday’s events has come from the right of the political spectrum. Some left-wing accounts have claimed the shooting represented a ‘false flag’ operation orchestrated by Trump’s own supporters to lend added impetus to his campaign ahead of the presidential election in November.
Experts continue to urge restraint and caution when sharing information as the United States continues to reel from the most serious attempt on a president’s life since the botched assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981.
As Graham Brookie, the Atlantic Council’s vice president for technology programs strategy, wrote in a recent post: ‘In any fast developing event, there is inevitably a high influx of false or unverified information, especially on social media. Please exercise empathy and caution as events unfold.’
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