A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:
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Claim: Photos shared on Reddit of a woman — wearing a Coca-Cola sweatshirt and black skirt in one picture and a NASA shirt in another — show the man who officials say fatally shot 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas. Another photo of a woman holding a green bottle to her mouth also shows him.
The facts: None of those images show the gunman, Salvador Ramos.
On Tuesday, the 18-year-old stormed an elementary school and committed the deadliest school shooting in the U.S. in nearly a decade. Immediately, social media users began speculating about the gunman’s identity, and some shared photos of transgender women that had been previously posted online, falsely claiming they were of him.
Some social media users shared a photo of a woman wearing a Coca-Cola sweatshirt and a black skirt, and a similar image in which she is holding a transgender pride flag.
Other widespread posts showed a photo from the same account of the woman wearing a black NASA shirt with a red skirt. “OMG! I found the shooter’s reddit account. Was a transgender,” one tweet of the two photos claimed. The post was later deleted for violating Twitter rules. The images were also shared in Facebook posts. But...
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