Conspiracy theories about the shooting at a Donald Trump rally began to emerge on x shortly after the news broke this afternoon, with the platform promoting topics like “#falseflag” and “staged” among users. x owner Elon Musk has been a staunch advocate for “free speech” on social media platforms, which can include misinformation like the one mentioned above.
Other major platforms appeared to largely avoid promoting misinformation.
On x, none of the trending topics about the shooting are packed with particularly strong or coherent conspiracy theories — if you click through, you’ll find mostly short posts from x users saying the shooting either seems fake or is a publicity stunt (there’s no evidence of either). But by placing the topics in x’s trending topic area, the conspiracy theories are elevated to more people.
Other major social media platforms appeared to handle the situation better in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. YouTube showed news snippets and steered search results largely toward news reports and verified creators. facebook’s search results mostly targeted news outlets; the platform removed its trending topics section in 2018 due to constant complaints about its curation. Occasionally, threads would show conspiracy-related posts about its trending topic for the incident, but they didn’t seem to appear consistently.
x did not respond to a request for comment. An email to his press team received an automated response saying: “I’m busy now, please check back later.”