The aftermath of the mass shooting in Las Vegas followed the usual dreary choreography of disaster news: First, disinformation rolled in from the usual assortment of trolls, then social media platforms amplified it. On Monday morning, Google’s Top Stories section promoted threads from 4chan, an online forum that’s a popular source of disinformation campaigns. The threads had deliberately misidentified suspects and victims, tying the shooter to Democrats, leftist groups, Islamic terror organizations, the federal government and others. Facebook, meanwhile, promoted a post from The Gateway Pundit to the top of its news feed, even though it had misidentified the suspected shooter. 4chan threads promoted by Google pushed the narrative that Islamic terrorists, Jewish people or Asians were responsible for the attack.

Source: Huffington Post October 02, 2017 18:46 UTC