Conspiracy theories about the Trump rally shooting flourish online

Conspiracy theories, false claims and unsupported assertions exploded online Saturday after Donald Trump was injured in what is being investigated as an assassination attempt during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

Wild theories about the attack, ranging from speculation about who the shooter was to claims about whether or not incident was planned, quickly accumulated millions of views on social media.

With few details about what actually occurred, conspiracy theorists, political operators and social media opportunists took advantage of the open field, pushing out unverified or unsupported claims onto tech platforms that have largely stepped back from moderating posts about major political breaking news events.

On X, conspiracy theories and false information about the incidents gained traction just minutes after the incident occurred.

As video of the incident ripped across the platform, quickly accumulating millions of views, the word “staged” became the second-highest trending topic immediately after “Trump,” with over 228,000 posts on the platform using the word. In just an hour, numerous posts on X claiming the apparent shooting was staged were viewed several millions of times. There is no evidence to support any claims that the shooting was staged — Trump was visibly injured, and a spectator was killed, while another was injured.

Posts on Meta’s Instagram and Threads echoed the sentiment, but to much smaller audiences.

“Antifa” also became a top trending topic on X after social media posts seemingly misidentified the gunman responsible for Saturday’s shooting.

The posts blamed a “prominent Antifa activist,” Mark Violets. Law enforcement had not publicly identified the shooter or released any information about his background as of Saturday evening.

After shootings that make national headlines — whether for jokes, to fool news media or to game the algorithm for engagement and followers — anonymous social media accounts often fill the vacuum of information with posts that misidentify the culprits.

In posts to X, Telegram and niche online spaces, users claimed that the false identification had come from the Butler Police Department. The posts included a photo of a man in sunglasses and a black hat alleging it was a screenshot from a video posted to YouTube before the attack in which the man claimed “justice was coming.” That was all false.

The posts were shared by verified accounts on X. One popular verified account, Wall Street Silver, which is known to spread misinformation, posted the claim to 1.3 million followers and later deleted it without explanation. Russian propaganda accounts, MAGA and Proud Boy channels on Telegram also spread the claim.

The person in the posts is, in fact, Marco Violi, an Italian YouTuber who vlogs about soccer. The lie seemingly began with a joke, first posted on X from the account @Moussolinho, which wrongly pointed to Violi as the shooter. His post included a photo of Violi taken from the account of another user, who often posted videos of Violi. 

That user, because his page was filled with videos of Violi, led people to swarm his account with accusations that he had tried to assassinate Trump. That user made his account private after people began publicly calling him the shooter. “This is absurd,” the user said over DM, declining to give his real name. “I had a photo of Marco and some video on my account, so people started thinking that I was this Mark Violets. But it was all fake news.”

Violi posted on his own Instagram account that the news was fake, writing in Italian, according to Meta’s translation, “I STRONGLY DENY BE INVOLVED IN THIS SITUATION. I WAS AWAKE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT (2AM IN ITALY TO BE PRECISE) FROM THE MANY NOTIFICATIONS I RECEIVED ON INSTAGRAM AND ON X. I’M IN ITALY, I’M IN ROME AND I HAD NO IDEA WHAT HAPPENED.”

Established conspiracy theorist Alex Jones livestreamed to an audience of hundreds of thousands of people on X after the incident. In a series of posts viewed millions of times Saturday, Jones blamed “the deep state.”

Similarly, X accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers known for sharing QAnon conspiracy theory content brought in millions of views sharing names of high-profile Democrats and Republicans they said were “possibly colluding” with the CIA to make the incident happen. There is no evidence supporting any aspect of the claim.