Rumors flew in the hours after a shooting at Brown University killed two students on Dec. 13. One falsehood had it that one of the victims, a leader of the college Republican Club, was “targeted for her conservative beliefs, hunted, and killed in cold blood.”
Another was that it had been a terrorist attack, a claim that made the rounds when a Palestinian student was identified as a possible suspect two days later and hounded on the internet.
A churn of disinformation after a major news event is hardly a surprise anymore, but its spread after the Brown killings was not limited to the dark fringes of the internet. It was fueled by prominent figures in business and government whose false statements or politically charged innuendo compounded public anger and anxiety.
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Rumors flew in the hours after a shooting at Brown University killed two students on Dec. 13. One falsehood had it that one of the victims, a leader of the college Republican Club, was “targeted f...