False news of the Vegas attack spread on Google, Facebook
MENLO PARK, Calif. — False news that erroneously named a suspect in the deadly Las Vegas mass shooting on Sunday spread on Google and Facebook before the services removed the posts in question, the two companies acknowledged Monday.
Erroneous posts on both services — one highlighted by Google’s “Top Stories” search results, the other circulated by Facebook users — falsely identified the shooter as an apparently uninvolved person.
Las Vegas police say Stephen Craig Paddock, of Mesquite, Nevada, fired down on concertgoers from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay casino hotel, killing at least 59 people and wounding more than 500 in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Paddock killed himself as authorities closed in.
But a story by the pro-Trump political website “The Gateway Pundit” named a different person as the shooter, citing a Facebook page to claim the individual was “a far left loon” and “a Democrat who liked (MSNBC host) Rachel Maddow.” Posters on the anonymous, anarchic 4chan.org forum likewise trumpeted supposed findings that the same individual was both the shooter and a “social democrat.” BuzzFeed saved screenshots of the stories, which no longer turn up on either Gateway Pundit or 4chan.