A look at some of the lives cut down by the church gunman,
In wake of shooting, false information clogs news feeds.
A Texas congressman fell for a long-running hoax on Sunday, mistakenly telling CNN that the gunman who had killed 26 South Texas churchgoers, including a pregnant woman and several children, was a man named Sam Hyde.
Soon after the lawmaker, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, made the remark, the gunman was identified as Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, a former member of the Air Force.
Sam 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.
Gonzalez 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 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 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.”
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 Hyde holding firearms, accompanied by false information linking him to the massacre. Many of those posting about Hyde see it as the kind of repetitive joke that sustains memes for years on end.
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 Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton; that he had converted to Islam; and that he had ties to the anti-fascist organization antifa, which has become a bugbear of the far right. None of these assertions had been reported by a credible news outlet.
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.