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We decided to examine the social media debates about the Québec mosque shooting, so we collected 18,533 tweets from Jan. 30 to Feb. 12, 2017, using the hashtags #QuebecShooting and #QuebecMosqueShooting. In our study of these hashtags, we found two main polarized communities making claims about their positions toward the Québec mosque shooting.

We also found the majority of social media users on Twitter showed sympathy toward the victims. To a lesser extent, we found that fake news stories were discussed mostly in relation to Fox News channel’s initial promotion of a Moroccan shooter (mentioned 1,335 times). The Moroccan discussed was in fact a witness to the shooting.

An antagonistic community promoted this false news as a way to attack mainstream media, especially CNN (referenced 119 times) for allegedly hiding facts and information about the identity of the fictitious Moroccan shooter.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office asked Fox News to take down the post on its website.

Photo by Ryan Remiorz / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Russian trolls on Québec

The most retweeted post, ranked No. 102, retweeted 19 times and recorded in our notes, was from @SouthLoneStar: “RT @SouthLoneStar: “Seems like #QuebecShooting suspect is a Moroccan Muslim who claims to be a white nationalist. Sorry for spreading m… https://t.co/JJvdcMTl3b.”

To further investigate, we did a simple Google search and found that SouthLoneStar was actually a Russian troll whose account was later removed by Twitter. This user had posted highly divisive messages and fake reports about Muslims, including a viral photograph of a Muslim woman in a hijab, wrongly characterized as casually talking on her cellphone while ignoring a victim of the Westminster terrorist attack on March 22, 2017.