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Unfounded conspiracies swirl online after shooting at White House Correspondents' Dinner 85%
4/27/2026, 11:51:31 PM
BS Summary: This video contains 38 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Anecdotal, and Appeal to Authority, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 37.7% saturation with 345 hits. Analysis detected 2,926 faulty-reasoning hits from 916 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 78.3% and a BS Rank of 85% (2,538 of 16,813 videos). This video is worse (more manipulative) than 84.90% of the video peer group.
Moments after shots were fired at Saturday's White House correspondents dinner,
social media sleuths tried to answer swirling questions with unfounded conspiracy theories.
People across the political spectrum baselessly calling the shooting staged even as there's nothing to back that up.
with authorities instead releasing evidence showing the suspect. Cole Tomas Allen allegedly storming through security
armed and countless journalists on site for the event working the story in real time.
Still posts containing the term
stage now surging on social media featured in more than 700,000 posts since midnight on Sunday according to data by tweet binder.
I >> just got home from the White House correspondent dinner.
It's after midnight.
After my own Instagram post directly following the shooting, people flooded my comments with accusations it was all staged, speculating the attack was a stunt to boost the president's ratings.
Some of the theories fueled in part by these comments from White House press secretary Caroline Levit ahead of the dinner.
This speech tonight will be classic Donald J. Trump.
It'll be funny. It'll be entertaining.
There will be some shots fired tonight in the room.
The relatively innocuous comment referencing what was to come in the president's speech then went viral after the incident.
Today, Levit was asked about the proliferation of misinformation, calling it nonsense.
It's very important to us that we get the truth and the facts about this case and any case out there as quickly as possible to dispel some of that crazy nonsense that you do see uh running rampant online.
Adding to the conspiracy, intrigue, a number of Trump allies posted on social media arguing the attack proves why the White House needs a new ballroom just minutes before the president made a similar point in his press conference.
The messaging does not mean the shooting was staged.
Ashley St. Clair, a former right-wing influencer who's been recently critical of Trump, did not entertain the idea of a so-called staged incident, but took to Tik Tok to explain
the tweets.
They coordinate their messaging in lockstep via group chat.
The administration did not comment specifically on St. Clair's assertion,
but a White House spokesperson tells us, quote, "Anyone who thinks President Trump staged his own assassination attempts is a complete moron."
Conspiracy theories in America have been common aftershocks around political earthquakes, but they seem to be forming and flying around the internet faster than ever before.
Social media is full of AI fakes, uh, political showmanship, and people are accustomed to being lied to, and so they don't necessarily anymore believe the truth when it's presented to them.
Two years later, there is still a contingent of doubters with unfounded allegations after the assassination
attempt against then candidate Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The president responding to the quick spread of such theories in a 60 Minutes interview Sunday.
I think they're more sick than they are con people, but there's a lot of con in it, too. I haven't heard that last night didn't happen.
What usually it takes a little bit longer. Yeah,
>> usually they wait about 2 or 3 months to start saying that.
>> At the moment, it seems like lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are staying above the fray and out of speculation,
while some also recognizing how quickly they're popping up. Like when I asked Congressman Jamie Raskin about it just minutes after Saturday night's incident.
This is going to fuel all that stuff.
Unfortunately,
>> fanning the flames online as authorities push forward with the highstakes investigation.
>> Julie is joining us now.
And Julie, part of this, too, is that there are images that are just not real.
They're made up that circulate online.
We've seen that in other instances before.
There's people purporting to have information that they don't actually have or presenting themselves as somebody who's they aren't actually online as well. So,
it's it's some of the misinformation stuff that we typically deal with in any political setting that's also coming to
to light in this instance, too.
Yeah, absolutely. Hie, you talk about those images, those videos.
I didn't really have time to look at my social media while I was standing and reporting out there, but I did very quickly see that fake images of this suspect when the president had shared the real one were popping up.
For example, him purportedly being with Usha Vans, the second lady of the United States, years ago.
That was fake. That was a video altered by AI.
another image showing that he had ties to the Israeli Defense Forces that was also fake.
So, you could see how quickly this misinformation spreads.
One of the things that that spreads. One of the things that that expert that I talked to, social media disinformation expert, that one of the things that he said, hi, that we didn't have time to include in the piece is
that look, a generation ago, people were patient.
They could wait for the news, right? They could wait to turn on the report the following morning.
This time around, social media and the misinformation that spreads fills that void as journalists try to get the facts, and that takes time.
>> we thank you for watching and remember,
stay updated on breaking news and top stories on the NBC News app or watch
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Analysis
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