The Vicious Circle of 4chans Mass-Shooting Hoaxes

Mass shootings have become such a depressingly regular occurrence that the stories that follow them can be predicted almost immediately. Someone will argue that tragedy shouldn’t be politicized. Someone will question the reasons we label some killers “terrorists” and others not. Someone will point out the legal loopholes that allow guns to be purchased more or less freely in the U.S.

One newer and particularly grim post-shooting mile marker is the hoax — the misidentified shooter, the incorrectly labeled photograph, the fake story that spreads after the shooting. Early this morning, in the hours after the mass killing at a country-music festival in Las Vegas, the continually inept right-wing blog Gateway Pundit misidentified an innocent man as the shooter based on errant 4chan speculation.

Online hoaxes are obvious targets for journalists: malicious lies that demand debunking by people with the platforms and resources to demonstrate that they’re not true. It’s almost a relief, in an increasingly fraught online news environment, to find a project so morally clear and reportorially straightforward, and you’ll often see outlets package big lists of myths, lies, and hoaxes soon after the shooting.

But as is often the case in online media, things that seem clear and straightforward often aren’t. In performing the service of fact-checking and error-correction, media outlets sometimes inadvertently give the hoax-pushing trolls exactly what they’re looking for: attention. This is hardly a new concern, but it is worth reexamining the impulse to preempt hoaxers before their claims gain traction.

“After every single goddamn shooting in this country, the same news cycle emerges from it. Every single time,” Whitney Phillips, a scholar of internet culture who’s currently researching media coverage of trolls, told me today. “I’ve been studying this for ten years now, and I have absolutely no doubt that the reason these same manipulations unfold around these tragedies is because they work, like clockwork. And they can set their clocks to a certain journalistic response, and that’s why they do it.”


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