A staged attack, using a plastic ear and fake blood. An attack under a false flag, in reality sponsored by the Israeli Mossad. A shooter believed to be an agent of the Democrat-controlled "deep state," possibly programmed by the CIA's MKUltra program. Since the attack on Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, July 13, which left one dead, two seriously injured and the former Republican president with an ear injury, many conspiracy theories have emerged. Some have focused on the motives and others the background of the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was shot dead by the Secret Service shortly after opening fire.
So far, it's all been par for the course. After every shooting or attack in the United States, largely wild and contradictory conspiracy theories have appeared online. This was the case after the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, during which 20 children were killed. For years, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed, without any proof whatsoever, that it never happened. He has since been ordered to pay nearly a billion dollars in damages after lawsuits were brought by the victims' families. This was again the case with the Las Vegas shooting in 2017, which left 58 people dead and nearly 500 injured after a man opened fire on a music festival from his hotel room.
The staying power of conspiracy theories has prompted some platforms to modify their posting rules, giving priority to content from sources considered reliable. YouTube, in particular, has drastically changed the way its "news" section operates. Over the weekend and on Monday, the video site relegated the most deranged videos to the end of its search results.
The opposite has been true on both X and Facebook, where the most basic searches have brought up posts falsely claiming that Trump is at death's door, or that Crooks was a far-left activist, which nothing has indicated to be the case at this stage. Photos of several different men wrongly being presented as Crooks have continued to be widely circulated and shared on both social media platforms and Telegram, where moderation is virtually non-existent. Several images intentionally altered for political purposes − including one showing agents from the Secret Service, the agency responsible for protecting heads of state and public figures, smiling just after the attack − are still being widely disseminated.
Some false information, created by flesh-and-blood internet users, went viral, notably that featuring photos of a Youtube football commentator presented as the shooter. The event also quickly showed the limitations of Grok, the generative artificial intelligence tool that X offers to its subscribers − the only one, according to Elon Musk, capable of processing news in real time, as it is fed by the platform's data. In reality, Grok provided some outlandish results in the hours following the attack, confusing Trump with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, for instance.
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