Social Media has become more and more important in the lives of billions of people throughout the world we live in today. Now, due the current COVID-19 pandemic, people are viewing an increasing amount of social media posts daily and are becoming more reliant on the internet and our digital environment to communicate with friends, family and the outside world. There are more than 2.4 billion people on Social Media and roughly 330 million of those are on Twitter. (Blankenship, 2020)
Twitter provides their users with the ability to share information with millions of others around the globe by ‘Tweeting’, ‘Retweeting’ and ‘Liking’ posts on a variety of different topics including news, entertainment and sports. Whenever a big story breaks online or huge events take place, people immediately react to what is going on, giving their own thoughts, sharing others’ or in the case of major broadcasting companies, enabling their audience to follow along on a certain event by posting regular updates for them. Following incidents like this, people are quick to create assumptions and believe false stories about a particular story. This has led to the major increase in the amount of “Fake News” that circulates around all social media and how quickly people believe it.
October 1st, 2017. A day that will forever be remembered in the history of the United States of America (USA), for all the wrong reasons. That day, Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old man from Nevada, killed 58 people and injured more than 850 at a music festival in Las Vegas.
Social Media played a substantial role in the way its users comprehended what had happened and assisted them to follow the tragedy as it unfolded on this day. Focusing back to Twitter, the Las Vegas shooting produced one of Twitter’s saddest days ever. Recorded by a Hedonometer, a device used to measure pleasure based on user posts and activity, it was revealed that after news broke of the killings, there was an average happiness level of 5.77 on users posts that day. This event was lower than previous records held by the shooting at an Orlando, Florida nightclub (5.84) and the day after Donald Trump became the president of the USA (5.87). (Musil, 2017) Only recently in 2020 has this been surpassed by Twitter posts relating to the Covid-19 pandemic and the protests against police brutality after the killing of George Floyd.
With this being one of Twitter’s saddest days ever recorded, a lot of negativity surrounded the social media site. With that came the ludicrous amount of ‘fake news’ which started to trend over Twitter regarding all sorts of aspects surrounding the shooting. The Oxford Dictionary defines fake news as “False information that is broadcast or published as news for fraudulent or politically motivated purposes.” Fake news is continuously growing, not just on Twitter but across all social media sites.
As shown by the graph below, the amount of social media interactions by unreliable sources has increased massively by 2.1 billion between 2019 and 2020. This clearly outlines that the problem is still going on right now and is only getting worse as years go by.
Figure 1: Social media interactions by source credibility
After such a huge massacre, the amount of fake news distributed by huge well-known media outlets and journalists exploded and the focus of this essay will look at the biggest trend across Twitter during and after the Las Vegas shooting, fake news.
1.) Political Affiliation.
The two biggest parties, since the 1850s, across the USA are the Democratic party and the Republican party. With such enormous parties, being followed by millions of people clashes of political and moral ideologies frequently spark arguments and violence among their supporters. Recently, historical tragedies have sadly fallen victim to huge amounts of hyper-partisan trolling as events are perceived and interpreted along polarised and opposite political viewpoints. In the case of Stephen Paddock, the shooter, many witnessed Twitter and several other social media sites like Facebook promoting stories about the man that claimed he was a Democrat who opposed of Donald Trump. (Levin, 2017) These statements could not be validated, were misleading and influenced many users’ narratives when reading or hearing about the incident. Misinformation and US mass shootings have recently appeared to be related. Modern events have proven this statement to be true, with the continual trend of fake news constantly becoming the epicentre of viral online propaganda. For example, Donald Trump’s Election in 2016. This had the interest of millions of people from all over the world. Therefore, there was a lot of discussion on social media about it, especially from those who had a particular political belief. The chart below produced by the ‘Nature communications’ Journal, gives us a reflection on the top news spreader accounts per media category. It summarises the fact that fake news was the second biggest media category to have the most ‘Unverified accounts’ tweeting about the Election. The highest media category to have the most ‘Deleted’ accounts tweeting about it was also fake news.
Figure 2: Verified, Unverified and Deleted accounts compared to political groups (Bovet & Makse, 2019)
The early ongoing trend that Stephen Paddock was a democrat was proved to be false as reported by The Daily Mail. Eric Paddock the brother of Stephen said he had “no political affiliation” and “no religious beliefs”. (Bucher, C. Oct. 4,2017) With millions of people reading and believing that this was what motivated the killer, the rumour was nothing more than a plan from various trolls on Twitter to get at their political opposition.
2.) The identity of the shooter.
One of the main misinformation topics that were spread across Twitter concerned the identity of the shooter. From terrorist groups, religious backgrounds and a man who was falsely accused to be the shooter, the rapid spread of people making accusations about the shooter’s identity was through the roof.
Starting with the claim that there were multiple shooters and that the massacre was not a one-man job. The figure below shows the amount of “Multiple shooters” tweets per day between October 1st and October 7th from a large study collected by Thomas Padilla and Miranda Barrie using data from the UNLV Libraries.
Figure 3: Tweets per day including “Multiple shooters”. (Barrie and Padilla, 2018)
With the massive increase on Tweets based on “Multiple shooters” between October 1st and October 2nd, it is clear to one that misinformation online can spread rapidly and shine an extra negative light on situations that are already bad enough.
After this, the discussion of terrorism comes into play as many started to believe that the shooter must have had a motive behind their actions or that they were involved with some sort of terrorist group.
Another graph created from the study previously talked about, shows in a similar way to the “multiple shooters” Tweets, the amount of “ISIS responsible” Tweets per day between the same time frames. It is to be noted that this chart is based on “Claim” and “Check” Tweets. “Claim” posts indicate ones where the misinformation is supported or introduced to the audience and “Check” posts indicate ones where there has been an attempt for the false information to be corrected.
Figure 4: Tweets per day including “ISIS responsible”. (Barrie and Padilla, 2018)
As shown by Figure 4, the highest amount of Tweets with this claim occurred on October 2nd, one day after the shooting, which shows a similar trend to Figure 3. That number then quickly started to decrease, picking up a small incline on October 6th. As displayed by Figure 4, the orange line which judges the amount of Tweets which were fact-checking the claims is significantly lower than the “Claim” posts. For users on Twitter, this yet again proves a worrying trend as to how quickly misinformation can be spread online in a matter of hours.
Finally, the actual shooter’s identity was probably the largest section of confusion which surrounded the massacre in October 2017. With people’s lives in danger and reputations on the line, being falsely accused as the Las Vegas shooter is not something Geary Danley ever thought he would be associated with. Due to his apparent connections with Marilou Danley the girlfriend of the eventual identified shooter, Stephen Paddock, he was linked to the attack by multiple people. Even after Paddock was identified as the shooter, users on social media would still go after Danley as an effort to link his politics with the massacre. This is a result of Danley being a member of groups on Facebook such as “Thank You Obama” and a lot of others opposing Donald Trump which led to people falsely linking him to the attacks. (Griffin, 2017).
The figure below shows what appeared when “Geary Danley” was typed into a google search on the days following the shooting, with hundreds of articles about the massacre emerging. Again, this conveys a butterfly effect with the utter amount of fake news that even Google themselves are appearing to promote due to multiple users sharing and spreading the news on popular social media sites.
Figure 5: “Geary Danley” in a Google search (Google)
Just like previous graphs, the following shows the number of “Shooter’s identity” Tweets recorded in the same time frame. The greatest number of tweets were recorded on October 2nd. On a rare occasion the number of fact-checked Tweets appeared to be greater than the amount of “Claim” Tweets, with both quickly declining in numbers as the days went by.
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