I reproduce the report’s points here:
● Following the attempted assassination, social media platforms have been inundated with false theories, many of which have gone viral.
● Cyabra conducted an analysis of phrases and hashtags associated with the predominant theory that the shooting was orchestrated by President Donald Trump. The investigation identified 3,115 profiles involved in this specific false narrative, 45% of whom were identified as fake accounts.
● The theory posited that Trump himself orchestrated the shooting to garner more voter support before the elections, labeling him a liar. It included the image of Trump with raised hands, suggesting that he had staged the event to boost his popularity in the media.
● The accounts engaged in the discourse surrounding the theory utilized hashtags such as #fakeassassination and #stagedshooting. These posts received over 404,000 engagements, potentially reaching an audience of 595 million views in a single day.
● The false narrative asserting that Trump staged the shooting was predominantly disseminated on X. Numerous accounts suggested that Trump, anticipating an electoral loss to Biden, orchestrated the incident to attract more voters and alter the prevailing narrative in the United States.
● This theory was disseminated by influential accounts with large followings. For instance, the authentic X account @BlackKnight10k, which has over 250,000 followers, shared several tweets amplifying the false narrative, claiming that the assassination should be widely dismissed as a joke because of its lack of credibility. His tweets garnered numerous comments and reached a wide audience of over 5.3 million potential views, many of whom agreed and added that no one in the crowd was injured, further supporting the theory that the incident was staged.
● The 45% of fake accounts engaged in this specific false narrative infiltrated genuine conversations, amplifying their false theory to a wide audience. As well as original posts, the fake accounts also commented on posts from authentic profiles to gain more views and maximize their impact.
● One of the primary strategies of the fake accounts was to circulate negative hashtags about Trump on social media to promote the theory.
● Cyabra has also identified an image circulating on social media that depicts Trump smiling after the shooting. Upon analysis, it seems that the image is fabricated, with the smile edited in to falsely portray Trump as having orchestrated the assassination.
One might get the impression from the report that the “Trump staged the shooting” theory was an astroturfed phenomenon due, in no small part, to a number of fake accounts on X. I think that’s not correct. I, for example, am not on X, and when I first heard of the shooting, I immediately thought that it could be a false flag or somehow staged. I know that I’m super-cynnical and black-pilled, but I think that more and more people are “waking up” and questioning the narrative. Just my 2 cents.
