Trump shooting shows conspiracy theories not confined to right wing

Soon after a bullet grazed Donald Trump’s ear, the conspiracy theory hashtags started appearing. Social media discourse on the shooting was immediately punctuated by #staged, #fakeassassination and #stagedshooting as a familiar refrain took hold: don’t trust what they tell you.

In a sign of how unstoppable these narratives become, the focus of distrust this time was Donald Trump, one of the arch-proponents of the argument that mainstream media and the establishment in general cannot be trusted.

X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, was the fulcrum of post-shooting scepticism. One post on X, with the hashtag #staged, queried whether a bullet really tore past Trump’s ear. It has been viewed more than 500,000 times.

“If it grazed him then where did the travelling bullet go as it would’ve continued flight towards those ppl?” it asked.

Much of the sceptical commentary relies on analysing images and footage taken by official media outlets at the Pennsylvania rally.

Another tweet from an account critical of Trump had 2.1m views as of Monday, although it did not carry one of the hashtags that proliferated around the internet from Saturday into Sunday. “A presidential candidate got ‘shot’ in the face and our collective reaction as a country was to laugh because nothing has ever looked so fake,” it said.

One conclusion experts are drawing from these posts is that they show conspiracy theories are not partisan and are not just a feature of rightwing discourse. Since Covid and the wave of scepticism it unleashed, it has become standard for vast numbers of people online to doubt the consensus view and interpret events in a way that rationalises their own worldview.

“Conspiracy theories are not limited to one political persuasion,” said Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a campaign group, adding that such viewpoints were an attempt to “place events in a narrative that makes sense to us” and that “reinforce our beliefs and biases”.

“Because of the high emotions around the [US] election, it reinforces people’s desire to fit what is happening around a pre-determined narrative that satisfies their political perspectives either way,” he said.

This has gone hand in hand with distrust of the media, even if much of the sceptical commentary around the shooting has relied on analysing images and footage taken by official media outlets at the Pennsylvania rally.

Conspiracy theories emanating from people with leftwing or liberal leanings has given rise to the term “Blueanon”, in reference to the blue Democratic party. The term is a derivation of “QAnon”, the baseless pro-Trump, rightwing conspiracy theory that a world-controlling satanic elite is operating a child abuse ring.

Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of digital platforms and ethics at the University of Oregon, said it “doesn’t serve the debate very well” to equate QAnon with the other side of the political spectrum, even if it makes for a neat pun.

“When people are panicking about Trump and voicing conspiracy theories, they are often panicking about something specific related to Trump or people within the Maga orbit,” she said.

QAnon devotees were heavily involved in the January riot on the Capitol and the theory has been referred to by mainstream politicians on the right, with Trump calling QAnon followers “people who love our country”.

Conservative social media accounts have weighed in with their own conspiracy theories on the shooting, querying how Thomas Crooks was able to come so close to assassinating Trump. A popular rightwing account on X posted on Sunday: “You’re telling me the Secret Service let a guy climb up on a roof with a rifle only 150 yards from Trump? Inside job.” The post, flagged by disinformation experts at NewsGuard, has had more than 7m views.

Trump shooting theories have been consumed on a vast scale since Saturday. Posts on X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok that used conspiracy theory hashtags may have been viewed up to 595m times within 11 hours of the shooting, according to Cyabra, an Israeli disinformation analysis firm.

Alongside posts from authentic accounts claiming that Trump staged the shooting to boost his election chances, Cyabra found evidence of coordinated attempts to propagate a false narrative. It investigated 3,115 social media profiles pushing the hashtags and found that 45% of them were “fake” accounts, a term covering a range of bad actors from automated accounts to sockpuppet operators, who use fictitious identities to pump out a specific narrative.

“The false narrative asserting that Trump staged the shooting was predominantly disseminated on X,” said Cyabra analysts in a report. “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.”

It is not just the presidency being contested, but any narrative related to it.