Minutes after the perpetrator of the shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis last week was identified, YouTube appeared to delete several videos they had shared that morning.
But not before the videos were downloaded and reshared in full on X.
Within hours, the platform was flooded with wild claims about the shooter and her motivation, with everyone from Elon Musk, the site’s owner, to the head of the FBI and left-wing activists posting half-baked allegations blaming anti-Christian hate, transgender genocide, and white supremacy. Many of the posts racked up millions of views per X’s public metrics.
While other social media platforms were also used to share unfounded claims about the shooter’s motivations, X, under Musk, has become the perfect platform to supercharge the spread of dangerous disinformation during breaking news events. The entire team tasked with tackling disinformation on the platform was first culled years ago, and now X’s biggest users claim they are incentivized by the platform to share out-of-context clickbait content over verified facts.
“X’s feed algorithm is fully designed to maximize engagement, even negative engagement,” says Laura Edelson, an assistant professor in the computer sciences college at Northeastern University who specializes in tracking disinformation online. “In these conditions, conspiratorial, extreme content tends to perform very well. And when you couple that with the fact that with X’s significantly weakened content rules, this is exactly what we would expect to result.”
X did not respond to WIRED‘s request for comment.
An 11-minute video from the shooter, which was shared by dozens of X accounts in the minutes after their identity was revealed, includes a wide array of guns and ammunition. The weapons were adorned with over 120 symbols, words, and phrases that reference dozens of hateful ideologies, mass shooters, memes, and coded language used by the nihilistic online communities the shooter was a member of.
As extremism researchers warned people against jumping to quick conclusions given the huge swathe of digital, written, and video content that needed to be analyzed, X users took very little notice.
The same day, screenshots from the video were used by everyone from elected lawmakers and senior government officials to law enforcement personnel, activists, podcasters, and conspiracy theorists on X to push particular narratives about what was to blame for the latest mass shooting.
In one of the primary narratives erroneously pushed immediately after the shooting, conservative influencers and politicians claimed that the perpetrator’s gender identity was at fault. Information about the shooter, who identified as transgender and changed her name to Robin Westman when she was 17 years old, spread like wildfire on X, pushed by a huge list of right-wing figures, including Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson, and Musk himself. X’s own AI-powered chatbot Grok refuted the idea that transgender people disproportionately carry out mass shootings.
Many X users, like right-wing commentator Nick Sortor, claimed the attack was motivated by hatred of God, citing “all the anti-Christian and and anti-God writings” on the shooter’s guns. FBI director Kash Patel seemed to boost these claims by posting that the shooting was being investigated as a “hate crime targeting Catholics.” Conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer alleged that the shooter was “radicalized by leftism and Islam.” Others cited anti-Israel phrases written on the weapons as proof the shooting was antisemitic.
