News events often hit social media like a rock thrown into a beehive, but when it’s the attempted assassination of a presidential candidate, the effect is more like a grenade. The impact sends angry bees flying in all directions, spreading misinformation and mindless speculation as they go. Nothing is too outlandish or improbable to be shared—and not just by anonymous accounts on X, but, in some cases, members of Congress. In the moments after Trump was shot on Saturday—he sustained an injury to his ear, then was hustled offstage while pumping his fist at the crowd—the shooter was variously rumored to be a member of antifa, a trans activist, and a Black Lives Matter operative. (He doesn’t appear to have been any of these things.) Different accounts described the shooting as both a “false flag” operation on the part of the Trump campaign in order to garner sympathy, and a carefully planned assassination plot on the part of the Biden administration and the “deep state.”
A typical comment came from one anonymous user who posted to X: “When did the Secret Service start allowing the President under duress to tell them ‘to wait,’ then stand up to be seen by the crowd fist-pumping? Can you blame me for thinking this is fake?” Users claiming to be law enforcement officers also scoffed at the idea that the Secret Service would allow Trump to grandstand while his life was in danger. According to the New Statesman, more than fifty thousand X users liked a post claiming that the photo of Trump raising his fist under the Stars and Stripes flag was staged: “Great camera angle; great quality; no Secret Service agent in front of his head covering the wound; conveniently placed US flag.” Another post read: “This is price you pay when you take down the elite satanic paedophiles,” then suggested that the “order” for the assassination “likely came from the CIA” and accused Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Mike Pence of being involved. It was viewed almost five million times.
According to a report from NewsGuard, a service that tracks misinformation, the word “staged” appeared in posts on X more than three hundred thousand times on Saturday and Sunday—an increase of almost four thousand percent over the previous two-day period. There were also more than eighty thousand mentions of the phrase “inside job,” which represented an increase of more than three thousand percent compared with a similar period before the shooting. Social media bots and fake accounts helped amplify the false claims on a number of platforms, according to Cyabra, an Israeli tech firm that found that 45 percent of the accounts using hashtags like #stagedshooting were inauthentic.
If some such posters were anonymous, others were well-known. Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, posted within minutes of the shooting that the assailant was an anti-Trump protester and “antifa extremist.” Other conservative users shared a video from an online troll who claimed that the gunman shot Trump because he hates Republicans; Mike Cernovich, a right-wing commentator who often shares conspiracy theories, said that the shooting was part of an FBI plot to inspire “copycat attacks.” Laura Loomer, another right-wing commentator and conspiracy theorist, wrote that Biden had been “planning to assassinate President Trump for a long time now.” Some accounts shared a photo that they said showed the perpetrator of the Trump shooting. The picture was later identified as being of an Italian journalist who mostly writes about soccer.
And it wasn’t just the fringe elements of the social sphere that shared conspiracy theories about the motive for the shooting. According to Semafor’s Kadia Goba, Dmitri Mehlhorn—an adviser to Reid Hoffman, a prominent Democratic donor and founder of LinkedIn—sent an email to his supporters after the shooting asking them to consider the possibility that it was “encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash.” (Mehlhorn later apologized for sending the email, which he said he composed and sent without talking to his staff.) According to The Economist, Sandra Chase, a Republican delegate who is attending this week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, said that she thought the assassination attempt was an inside job and that the FBI would cover it up.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, also questioned whether the failure of the Secret Service to stop the shooter was incompetence or “deliberate,” and then replied to a post implying that the reason for the possible incompetence was an agency focus on “diversity hires.” Following the shooting, Musk—who, in the days prior, was reported to have donated an undisclosed amount of money to a Trump-aligned super-PAC—also took the opportunity to publicly and “fully” endorse Trump. (Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk plans to give around forty-five million dollars to the PAC every month.) Meanwhile, according to Fast Company, AI-generated summaries on Musk’s platform mistakenly claimed that the person who was shot was actually Vice President Kamala Harris or an actor from the movie Home Alone 2. (Not that the latter was wrong: Trump, of course, appeared in Home Alone 2.)
For some observers, the shooting and its aftermath were further evidence of a disturbing phenomenon that has been referred to as “BlueAnon,” or the idea of a left-wing or liberal equivalent to the right-wing QAnon conspiracy cult that propagated the Pizzagate pedophile-ring rumors, among other things. According to the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz, the term BlueAnon was first used by conservative commentators to mock the claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, but some liberals have more recently invoked it to refer to a range of outlandish conspiracy theories about shadowy forces working to depose Biden and institute a Trump dictatorship. Karl Folk, a researcher who studies authoritarianism, told Lorenz that this “more conspiratorial mind-set has become more pronounced in liberal circles over the last eight months.”
According to Lorenz, this kind of content is popular on Threads, the social network that Meta launched a year ago. (I wrote last week about its one-year anniversary.) The new network has emerged as what Lorenz called a “hotbed of BlueAnon conspiratorial content,” in part because many liberals and Democratic supporters abandoned X after Musk acquired the company and started platforming far-right accounts and racist content. If this is true, then it’s happening despite Meta’s explicit efforts to prevent news and commentary about politics from spreading on the platform. (I’ve also covered this aspect of Threads.)
Meanwhile, little is actually known for certain about Thomas Matthew Crooks, the man who has been identified as the shooter at the Trump rally. The New York Times reported that investigators were scouring his online presence and working to gain access to his phone, but so far had not found any “indications of strongly held political beliefs” or come up with much else. Crooks was a registered Republican but had also donated fifteen dollars to a progressive cause in 2021; he appears to have had an account on the chat app Discord, but the company said he used it rarely, and there’s no evidence that he promoted violence or discussed political views there. So far, no other record of sustained online activity by Crooks has been found, nor any indication of why he decided to shoot Trump.
This differentiates Crooks from various other domestic terrorists and mass murderers in recent years who have left trails of online activity—and, sometimes, explicit writings about their crimes—in their wake. There was always going to be a lot of loud buzzing around an event like the Trump shooting. The lack of concrete information has only made it worse.
Other notable stories:
- The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel also explored the informational chaos that followed the shooting, arguing that “a terrifying shared reality of political violence” briefly crystallized online before splintering again. “Our information ecosystem is actually pretty good while the dust is up,” Warzel writes. “But the second it begins to settle, that same system creates chaos.” Meanwhile, multiple photojournalists told Aïda Amer, of Axios, that they fear their colleagues’ iconic images of Trump in the shooting’s aftermath could become a kind of “photoganda” for Trump’s campaign; one described news outlets’ prolific use of a photo by Evan Vucci, of the Associated Press, as “free PR for Trump in a way” and “dangerous.” And Raw Story reports on the proliferation of merchandise using news outlets’ Trump photos without authorization. The AP said that it reserves its image rights.
- 404 Media’s Emanuel Maiberg reports that so-called “AI maxers,” who generally support the unimpeded development and deployment of the technology, are thrilled that Trump tapped J.D. Vance as his running mate, seeing Vance as a reliable opponent of government regulation—though Maiberg notes that AI policy debates do not “map neatly to the blue/red dichotomy of American politics.” In other AI news, Annie Gilbertson and Alex Reisner report, for Wired and Proof News, that tech companies have been using YouTube videos to train their AI engines without creators’ knowledge. And unionized staffers at three publications owned by Ziff Davis tentatively agreed to a contract that contains “precedent-setting” protections against AI, Nieman Lab’s Andrew Deck reports.
- Yesterday, a federal jury in New York convicted Carlos Watson, the founder of Ozy Media, of charges that he defrauded investors. “Many of the government’s witnesses revealed new details about deception at the company, including an impersonated phone call, fabricated contracts and misleading claims about Ozy’s earnings,” the New York Times, which broke open the Ozy scandal in 2021, reports. Before the trial, Watson argued that he engaged in the same tactics as other media-startup founders and was being singled out because he is Black, but a judge rejected a motion to dismiss the case on these grounds. During the trial, Watson attempted to deflect blame to other staffers.
- Earlier this year, we noted in this newsletter that high school journalists in Lawrence, Kansas, were pushing back on their school district’s use of surveillance software ostensibly aimed at monitoring students for signs of mental-health crises and drug use, among other problems; the district agreed to remove the journalists from the program, but they continued to fight for students’ privacy, and the Kansas Reflector’s Grace Hills reports that they still aren’t satisfied. Last week, the school district moved to renew the software despite student journalists presenting board members with concerns about it.
- And Musk—who already moved the headquarters of Tesla, his electric vehicle company, from California to Texas in protest of the former state’s COVID-era rules—said yesterday that he would be relocating both X and SpaceX to Texas as well, citing a new California law aimed at barring school districts from forcing teachers to out transgender pupils to their parents. Per Musk, X will now be based in Austin, though one expert in corporate law told the Times that he’d be surprised if X leaves California behind entirely.
ICYMI: In the wake of the Trump shooting, whose job is it to ‘turn down the heat’?
Mathew Ingram is CJR’s chief digital writer. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the earliest days of the commercial internet. His writing has been published in the Washington Post and the Financial Times as well as by Reuters and Bloomberg.