Funny Video Animation Las Vegas Shooting Hoax
Sam Hyde and Other Hoaxes: False Information Trails Texas Shooting
A United States congressman fell for a long-running hoax on Sunday, mistakenly telling CNN that the gunman who had killed 26 Texas churchgoers, including a pregnant woman and several children, was a man named Sam Hyde.
Soon after the lawmaker, Representative Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, made the remark, the gunman was identified as Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, a former member of the Air Force.
Mr. Hyde is a real person, an absurdist comedian whose jokes often lean far right politically. For the last several years, his name has been surfaced by anonymous social media accounts in connection with mass shootings, to the point that "Sam Hyde is the shooter" has become an identifiable meme.
Mr. Gonzalez, a Democrat, told CNN as the news was breaking that the gunman's name "was released as Sam Hyde; that was the name I was given."
A spokeswoman for Mr. Gonzalez, Aryn Fields, explained that the congressman had been given the name by a television producer while on standby with a television network, waiting to speak on the air. Once that first appearance was over, he was interviewed via phone on CNN, where he said the name.
"Given how fast the events transpired Sunday, Congressman Gonzalez took this report as reliable information," his office said in a statement. "It is something that he deeply regrets."
The statement added that Mr. Gonzalez "does not follow memes, internet sensations, or Twitter trends and was unaware that this name is a viral internet hoax that has been connected to mass shootings in the past."
But the Sam Hyde meme was only one of many strains of disinformation that spread immediately after the shooting, in a pattern that has become as familiar as mass shootings themselves.
Who is Sam Hyde?
Mr. Hyde has been falsely named as the gunman in a number of mass killings, dating at least to the shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., in December 2015, which left 14 people dead.
The comedian had gained a measure of viral fame several years earlier, when a TED Talk parody he made as part of the sketch comedy group Million Dollar Extreme was viewed widely. In 2015, the group was given a sketch show on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. The show ran for a season and was not renewed after BuzzFeed reported that it was a darling of the alt-right.
In the wake of mass shootings, anonymous social media accounts often post images of Mr. Hyde holding firearms, accompanied by false information linking him to the massacre. Many of those posting about Mr. Hyde see it as the kind of repetitive joke that sustains memes for years on end.
After the shooting in Las Vegas last month, an anonymous Twitter account that describes itself as a "high altitude Übermensch" and "persona non grata in a Leftist paradise" identified Mr. Hyde as the shooter in florid, over-the-top language.
"I really hate that this made me laugh," another user replied. "That Sam Hyde."
Other disinformation
Justin Hendrix, the executive director of NYC Media Lab, an organization that encourages innovation in media, highlighted another source of disinformation on Sunday: a set of tweets that were amplified by Google immediately after the shooting.
The tweets, which appeared in a Google News feature called "popular on Twitter," included speculation that the Texas gunman had been a supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton; that he had converted to Islam; and that he had ties to the anti-fascist organization known as antifa, which has become a favored bugbear of the far right. None of these assertions had been reported by a credible news outlet.
In an interview on Monday, Mr. Hendrix pointed out that such tweets were filling a news hole in the immediate aftermath of a news event, during which consumers are hungry for information.
"The trolls and bots know it, and they're able to game the algorithms," he said. "Until the algorithms have something that has some credibility to fill the void, they'll just fill it with anything."
In a statement, Google said that such search results changed second by second, and that it would continue to try to improve how such tweets were ranked.
Other rumors spread directly after the Texas shooting. But Emily Thorson, a political scientist at Syracuse University who specializes in the way that misinformation affects American politics, questioned the value of highlighting such information, even if only to debunk it.
She said that members of the mainstream media — including Google — pay far closer attention to social media, particularly Twitter, than most Americans. She added that the symbiosis between the two types of media could amplify and spread false news, even when outlets like The New York Times were trying to do the opposite.
Ms. Thorson was particularly skeptical of articles that focused purely on debunking false information. She said that her research had shown that such articles could be ineffective, spreading bad information even to those who were likely to believe that the information was wrong.
"When you see a piece of misinformation, even when it's in the context of being corrected and you believe the correction, it can still have lingering effects on your attitudes," she said.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/us/shooting-texas-hoaxes.html
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