A Toronto retiree was falsely named online as Charlie Kirk’s killer. Photo / Kim Raff, New York Times
Michael Mallinson received a harried call from his daughter shortly after Charlie Kirk, the right-wing influencer, was shot in Utah on Wednesday.
She said that his photo was circulating online and that he had been identified – falsely – as the shooter.
In a phone interview on Wednesday (United States time), Mallinson said he was a 77-year-old retired banker who was in Toronto, where he lived. But thousands of posts on social media claimed he was a registered Democrat from Utah who had shot and killed Kirk.
The mix-up was apparently because of Mallinson’s resemblance to a man who was briefly detained by the police after the shooting.
“I’m just shocked by it,” he said in the interview. “How quickly it can happen, how one’s name and photo can get spread around quite quickly.”
In the frantic aftermath of major breaking news, people tend to search desperately for new information. That process can sometimes lead to false conclusions. Social media can add another chaotic element, with unconfirmed claims spreading widely and rapidly before they are fully checked out.
In Mallinson’s case, the rumour appeared to have originated from an account on the social platform X called Fox 11 Reno, though it has no relation to a Fox broadcast affiliate based in Nevada. Instead, it is a fake account, apparently meant to drum up traffic – and ad revenue – for its own phoney website. Until late last year, the account used a different username and posted only in Spanish. (The account later deleted its posts about the shooting.)
A spokesperson for Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns the Fox affiliate in Nevada, said the account was “impersonating the station” and the group was trying to shut it down.
Such websites are known to respond to so-called “information voids” by publishing claims about developments in a breaking news story in an effort to rank highly on search results. When someone searches for more information and clicks on the website, the site’s owners collect a few pennies from the ad impressions they generate.
Other users on X quickly repeated the claim about Mallinson, wrongly citing “Fox” as their source. Some users replied to the original post, calling Mallinson a “far left extremist” or “pure evil.” One post by a user on X, which claimed Mallinson was the shooter and a registered Democrat, received nearly 3 million views.
Soon, Mallinson was receiving direct messages on Facebook calling him a “savage”, among other names.
Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot created by Elon Musk’s xAI, repeated the falsehood in some of its replies to users, writing at one point that “the suspect, Michael Mallinson, was apprehended at the scene”. Grok sources some of its information from posts on X. (Other posts from Grok said the connection was unconfirmed or discredited.)
X did not respond to a request for comment.
Mallinson said he had reported the incident to local police and has tried to wipe his presence from all social media. It was a difficult decision, he said, because he works as a patient advocate for a rare and painful form of arthritis and uses social media to connect with people around the world.
He said he may consider suing people or websites that circulated the falsehood if the ordeal continued.
“I would expect, because the news cycle moves so quickly, that it will blow over soon,” Mallinson said. “But there’s always a chance that some idiots somewhere will get hold of this information a few months from now and start making noise about it.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
Written by: Stuart A. Thompson
Photographs by: The New York Times, Getty Images
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