Almost as soon as gunshots were reported from the White House Correspondents\u2019 dinner on Saturday night, social media was flooded with conspiracy theories and finger-pointing over the attack. In a now-common phenomenon after such incidents, prominent influencers fill the information vacuum with speculation in a bid for attention and followers.<\/p>\n
The miasma of falsehoods, rumors and conjecture has clouded multiple breaking news moments in recent years, including two previous assassination attempts against President Trump and the capture<\/a> of Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, then Venezuela\u2019s president.<\/p>\n This time, users from across the political spectrum were participating in the chaos on platforms like X, Facebook and TikTok. Some users claimed that the attack was \u201cstaged,\u201d suggesting without evidence that it was part of an apparent plot by Mr. Trump or others to distract from bad polling numbers or the war with Iran. The term \u201cstaged\u201d surged to more than 300,000 posts on X by midday Sunday, according to data by TweetBinder<\/a>, a social media analytics company owned by Audiense. (At least some of those posts refuted the notion that the attack was planned.)<\/p>\n Other users were quick to assign blame, tying the shooter to Israeli causes without proof, and using imagery that was apparently manipulated with A.I. tools to support their claims. RT, a Russian state news channel, amplified some of those claims on X.<\/p>\n The result is an almost-instant online free-for-all over the truth, which plays out in just seconds and minutes after news of an attack is made public, and continues for days and weeks even as the truth often remains elusive. Nearly two years after an assassination attempt on Mr. Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania, for example, many influential accounts continue to claim that the event was staged, even though two people were killed.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople are reshaping reality based on what they want to be true or not,\u201d said Cliff Lampe, a professor and associate dean for academic affairs at the School of Information at University of Michigan. \u201cThey\u2019re not looking for good information, they\u2019re looking for confirmatory information, and will often go very deep down a rabbit hole of side-by-side pictures, microshots of the president\u2019s face, et cetera.\u201d<\/p>\n At the same time, the president has participated more actively online than previous leaders, marshaling his supporters to post about events as he does, and fanning the flames of conspiratorial thinking. After the attack on Saturday, Mr. Trump said the ordeal should support his effort to build a gilded ballroom on White House grounds. Scores of right-wing influencers picked up the message, sharing posts that said Mr. Trump\u2019s planned ballroom was an urgently needed addition to White House security measures. (The dinner was held at the Washington Hilton Hotel.)<\/p>\n Among the most-shared posts online on Saturday night and Sunday were claims that the attacker was shot and killed on scene \u2014 in fact, he was arrested \u2014 along with speculation about his motives and political alliances. After some of the posts gained millions of views, the authors sometimes posted corrections that made clear that the attacker was not killed, but those received only a fraction of the views.<\/p>\n \u201cRumor moves very quickly, and then it often takes a very long time to correct those errors,\u201d Dr. Lampe said.<\/p>\n Influencers have motivation to post speculation and rumor, even if they do not believe it: The attention it brings can be vital in gaining followers and, on revenue-sharing platforms like X, can mean larger payouts.<\/p>\n