UNLV students wait along Maryland Parkway after being evacuated due to a fatal shooting after a fatal shooting on the UNLV campus Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2023.
Sunday, Dec. 10, 2023 | 2 a.m.
The bullets began flying around 11:45 a.m. Wednesday on the UNLV campus. Reports of an active shooter followed seconds later.
Over the next few hours, social media sites such as X and Reddit would be flooded with videos of frightened students scrambling across the Maryland Parkway campus fearing for their lives, others posting messages that they were safe.
Also included in the torrent were posts filled with inaccuracies that ignited a chain of misinformation.
Take a post on X (formerly Twitter) by a user who goes by the name Dr. Jeremiah Emmanuel. He posted a clip from an earlier news broadcast and claimed there was an “FBI coverup incoming.”
The message was reposted by more than 600 users and gained more than 1,500 likes despite the account having 839 followers.
But 790,000 people had seen it by Wednesday night, and it pushed any legitimate news updates further down in the tags — making it harder for people seeking information from official accounts used by the university and law enforcement.
“For situations like this, typically official sources first make their announcements on social platforms anyways, so you’re able to get verified information,” said Mary Blankenship, a graduate student researcher at the Brookings Mountain West Institute who studies misinformation and disinformation. “But then, what you also start seeing on social media is very quickly an influx of tweets discussing gun reforms, disseminating claims and conspiracy theories … which was very frustrating.”
The number of casualties and shooters became so exaggerated that a Metro Police officer working a safety shelter at University Church Las Vegas told the assembled students to wait for updates from law enforcement. The officer stressed to not rely on what was being reported on social media, where inaccurate accounts indicated there were multiple shooters and that fatalities were in the double digits.
The reality, which was relayed in multiple briefings by Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill, was the incident was carried out by a lone gunman. That shooter was killed by law enforcement and there were three fatal victims, all of whom were later identified as professors.
Negative posts arouse interest
Blankenship, who had stayed home Wednesday because she was sick, watched through Zoom as her colleagues on campus were sheltering in place. She stayed online to give them support.
At the same time, she started scrolling through social media for updates — initially starting with official accounts, like that of Metro Police.
Her timeline was filled with more posts containing fake death counts, conspiracy theories and gun control debates than actual news about the shooting, she said.
Much of this may have been spread with good intentions by unknowing social media users, but Blankenship says such posts make finding legitimate news more challenging by pushing it deeper within social channels. It can also draw away from the experiences of shooting survivors by burying it under conspiracy theories and discourse, she added.
Floods of misinformation are something she’s observed throughout her studies of other mass shootings, but Wednesday’s was unique in that it was the second mass shooting Las Vegas has experienced in the past decade. And it was at the university she calls home.
That sort of “past trauma” that people have as a result of the Oct. 1, 2017, shooting on the Strip that immediately killed 58 and wounded hundreds of others may make people more emotionally responsive to a situation like this, which might have caused them to react to misinformation more, she explained.
Social media algorithms — which show users posts based on their previous likes and shares — also help deliver more misinformation as opposed to the verified news, said Samuel Spitale, author of “How to Win the War on Truth.” Studies have shown posts that get liked and shared typically appeal to our negative emotions, Spitale said, and a post is more likely to be shared if it arouses more negative feelings.
Combine a suggestive algorithm, bias toward negative stimuli and fight-or-flight response that makes people more suggestive to manipulative content, (and) you get misinformation that “circulates like wildfire,” he said.
“If there’s a posting that says that three people died and there’s one that says that 30 people died, then chances are we’re going to gravitate towards that 30, whether it’s true or not,” Spitale said. “The truth matters less than how it makes us feel, and social media algorithms never send us less emotionally arousing content.”
‘Control of information’
There were many accounts — some branded as news organizations — reporting that over two dozen people had been hurt, or that there were multiple shooters.
In a post with “#BREAKING” and “#URGENT,” one account reposted a video of police and SWAT cars racing down the street near UNLV with the caption, “WOW….. Per scanner reports, 28 people shot at UNLV (Las Vegas) in campus shooting. The campus is still on lockdown.”
It gained 733 reposts, 866 likes and had nearly 500,000 views by Wednesday night. The post was made around 1 p.m. Wednesday by Brian’s Breaking News and Intel, a blue-check-marked account that claimed to have worked at a company called Royal Intel.
It’s just they were woefully off.
Some students made their concerns about the rampant misinformation known Wednesday night on Reddit.
“The amount of misinformation during the shooting was outrageous,” one Reddit user wrote in a post. “The amount of worry it spreads should make those people feel nothing but shame.”
Some users wrote that they had learned from primary sources — a nurse friend at Sunrise Hospital, or a police officer at the campus — who continued to spread the narrative about 28 casualties and more dead.
Another person said one of the group chats he received included a Snapchat story screenshot of a student claiming to be a criminal justice major that reported more than 35 victims and three shooters.
“I feel like this happens a lot with shooting situations. People panic, their mind creates illusions under stress and they get reported,” said another Reddit user named Nerfman2227. “I seem to remember a lot of wild false reporting during the October 1st incident, too … Spreading this kind of info without any sources feels wildly irresponsible, to say the least.”
Thousands of concerned community members used a website to stream the live radio of the Las Vegas Fire Department, and fed that chatter to the people around them. In a press conference Thursday afternoon, Las Vegas Fire Chief John Steinbeck said the “control of information” was a problem.
At one point, Steinbeck was receiving victim counts that were “way higher than what we ended up with,” he said.
And it’s a problem that Steinbeck, Spitale and Blankenship all believe won’t go away.
Spitale says the solution “has to be multifaceted” — such as holding social media companies accountable for hate speech or damaging lies — while Blankenship encourages people to seek verified information themselves from legitimate sources.
“Part of the problem is our need for immediate information while the people we trust have to take their time to verify that information,” Spitale said. “I think (misinformation) will be an issue we’ll struggle with, but that’s not to mean we can’t try to do something about it.”
grace.darocha@gmg vegas.com / 702-948-7854 / @gracedarocha
