Providence(R.I.)- Wild conspiracy theories and misinformation are expected to follow when a tragedy happens. It happened after Sandy Hook, Parkland, the Orlando nightclub shooting, and the deadly rampage at a Buffalo grocery store earlier this month. Now with the Texas shooting. Within hours of Tuesday’s school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, another rash began, with internet users spreading false information about the gunman and his possible motives.
Unfounded claims that the gunman was an illegal immigrant or a transgender person spread quickly on Twitter, Reddit, and other social media platforms. They were accompanied by well-known conspiracy theories claiming that the entire Texas shooting was staged.
According to disinformation expert Jaime Longoria, the claims reflect broader issues with racism and intolerance toward transgender people. They attempt to blame the shooting on minority groups who already face higher rates of online harassment and hate crimes.
“It’s a tactic that serves two purposes: It avoids real conversations about the issue (of gun violence) and gives people who don’t want to face reality a patsy. It gives them someone to blame,” said Longoria, director of research at the Disinfo Defense League, a non-profit that fights racist misinformation.
The hours after the shooting, posts falsely claiming the gunman was living in the country illegally went viral. Some users added embellishments, including that he was “on the run from Border Patrol.”
“He was an illegal alien wanted for murder from El Salvador,” read one tweet liked and retweeted hundreds of times. “This blood on Biden’s hands should have never happened.”
In a news conference on Tuesday, the man who authorities say carried out the shooting, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, is a U.S. citizen, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said.
Other social media users seized on images of innocent internet users to falsely identify them as the gunman and claim he was transgender. On the online message board 4Chan, users liberally shared the photos and discussed a plan to label the gunman as transgender, without any evidence to back it up.
One post on Twitter, which has since been deleted, featured a photo of a trans woman holding a green bottle to her mouth, looking into the camera, headphones hanging from one ear.
“BREAKING NEWS: THE IDENTITY OF THE SHOOTER HAS BEEN REVEALED,” claimed the user, saying the shooter was a “FEMBOY” with a channel on YouTube.
None of that was true. The photo depicted a 22-year-old trans woman named Sabrina who lives in New York City. Sabrina, who requested her last name not be published due to privacy concerns, confirmed to The Associated Press that the photo was hers and said she was not affiliated with the purported YouTube account.
Sabrina said she received harassing responses on social media, particularly messages claiming that she was the shooter. She responded to several posts spreading the image with the misidentification, asking for the posts to be deleted.
“This whole ordeal is just horrifying,” Sabrina told the A.P.
Another widely circulated photo showed a transgender woman with a Coca-Cola sweatshirt and a black skirt. A second photo showed the same woman wearing a black NASA shirt with a red dress. These photos didn’t show the gunman either — they were of a Reddit user named Sam, who confirmed her identity to the A.P. on Wednesday. The A.P. is not using Sam’s last name to protect her privacy.
“It’s not me. In a Reddit post, I don’t even live in Texas,” Sam wrote.
Authorities have released no information on the gunman’s sexuality or gender identification.
Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar fit both unfounded claims about Ramos in a single now-deleted tweet that also misspelt his name. “It’s a transsexual leftist illegal alien named Salvatore Ramos,” Gosar tweeted Tuesday night.
Gosar’s office did not return a message seeking comment.
In some cases, misinformation about mass shootings or other events is spread by well-intentioned social media users trying to be helpful. In other cases, it can be the work of grifters looking to start fake fundraisers or draw attention to their website or organization.
Then there are the trolls who seemingly do it for fun.
Fringe online communities, including on 4chan, often use mass shootings and other tragedies as opportunities to sow chaos, troll the public and push harmful narratives, according to Ben Decker, founder and CEO of the digital investigations consultancy Memetica.
“It is very intentional and deliberate for them to celebrate these types of incidents and influence what the mainstream conversations are,” Decker said. “There’s a nihilistic desire to prove oneself in these communities by successfully trolling the public. So if you can spearhead a campaign that leads to an outcome like this, you’re gaining high in-group credibility.”
For the communities bearing the brunt of such vicious online attacks, the false blame stirs fears of further discrimination and violence.
Something as seemingly innocuous as a transphobic comment on social media can spark an act of violence against a transgender person, said Jaden Janak, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas and a junior fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies.
“These children and adults who were murdered yesterday were just living their lives,” Janak said Wednesday. “They didn’t know that yesterday would be their last day. And similarly, as trans people, that’s a fear that we have all the time.”