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Facebook and Google promoted false news stories that, in the early, chaotic hours during and after the Las Vegas attack, misidentified a man as the shooter, Sam Levin reports.

Before authorities named 64-year-old Stephen Paddock as the suspect, some falsely identified the gunman as someone named Geary Danley. It’s unclear where exactly the hoax originated, but rightwing users aggressively promoted his name, seizing on evidence that he was a liberal.



On 4chan, the anonymous message board and a favorite platform of the “alt-right”, some noted that Danley was a registered Democrat. Soon after, Gateway Pundit, a conspiracy-laden blog that now has White House credentials, published an evidence-free story headlined “Las Vegas Shooter Reportedly a Democrat Who Liked Rachel Maddow, MoveOn.org and Associated with Anti-Trump Army”. The piece was based on a review of Facebook “likes”.

Despite the fact that the claims were unproven and coming from non-credible sources, Facebook’s “Safety Check” page, which is supposed to help people connect with loved ones during the crisis, ended up briefly promoting a story that said the shooter had “Trump-hating” views, along with links to a number of other hoaxes and scams, according to screenshots. At the same time, Google users who searched Geary Danley’s name were at one point directed to the 4chan threadfilled with false claims.

The successful manipulation of social media algorithms to politicize a tragedy speaks to a relatively new pattern of online abuse – from the careless and accidental, like the misidentification of the suspect behind the Boston marathon bombing in 2013, to overt exploitation and targeted disinformation.

“It’s getting more polarized. There’s this mad scramble to paint the guy as a Democrat or a Republican, so they can cheer,” Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of fact-checking website Snopes.com, said in an interview. “A lot of this is pushed by trolls deliberately to muddy the conversation.”

Google, Facebook and Twitter have faced repeated accusations that they allow propaganda to spread on their sites and reach large audiences. The tech corporations have typically blamed their algorithms and offered vague pledges of improvement.



The Mandalay Bay shooting was no exception. Google said in a statement: “Unfortunately, early this morning we were briefly surfacing an inaccurate 4chan website in our Search results for a small number of queries. Within hours, the 4chan story was algorithmically replaced by relevant results. This should not have appeared for any queries, and we’ll continue to make algorithmic improvements to prevent this from happening in the future.

Facebook attempted to downplay its role in promoting false stories, saying in a statement: “Our Global Security Operations Center spotted these posts this morning and we have removed them. However, their removal was delayed, allowing them to be screen captured and circulated online. We are working to fix the issue that allowed this to happen in the first place and deeply regret the confusion this caused.”