Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump appears to be injured after gunshots were reported as he is rushed offstage during a rally. Photo / Getty Images
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump appears to be injured after gunshots were reported as he is rushed offstage during a rally. Photo / Getty Images
Consider the possibility: Donald Trump stages an assassination attempt against himself, almost certain to emerge a hero with an unassailable lead in the US presidential campaign. Perhaps he uses fake blood. Perhaps the Secret Service is somehow in on the charade and therefore does not respond as quickly and as thoroughly as might be expected.
The defining image of the episode is of Trump raising a defiant fist beneath an American flag. Setting aside the inconvenient truth that a man in the crowd was killed, as well as the shooter, isn’t it all too perfect? Isn’t there something strange about all this?
If you’re tempted to believe that this theory, without any supporting evidence, explains what really happened at Saturday’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, then it’s not hard to make the “facts” – or images, or unanswered questions – appear to fit. Within minutes of the shooting, social media platforms were awash with liberal, anti-Trump users doing exactly this: creating a wave of “BlueAnon” disinformation, so-called in a nod to the infamous right-wing QAnon theory (blue being the traditional colour of the Democratic party).
“If this were truly an assassination attempt, do you think the Secret Service would allow an open, clear target like this?” wrote one X user, with almost 29,000 followers, above images of Trump’s white-shirted torso apparently exposed to all comers.
“Is it just me or does anyone else find it suspicious there’s no blood on his white shirt??” asks a third, whose X biography describes her as a “model, actor, influencer, activist”, and whose followers number 84,500. And so it goes on, and on. Conspiracies around the attempted assassination have already been viewed more than 215 million times on X, with 95 per cent of posts failing to carry a fact check, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a civil liberty charity in the US.
Conspiracy theories themselves are, of course, nothing new. While social media boosts their spread and reach, they predate the internet by aeons. But recent discourse around them has tended to focus on right-wing conspiracy theories, QAnon being one of the most famous – a bizarre belief about an elite cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles said to be secretly trying to bring down Trump. Originating on the message board 4chan in 2017, the theory went on to gain a remarkably large following.
A study by Pew Research Center in 2020 found that a sizeable number (about 40 per cent) of Republicans who had heard about it had a positive view of it. The movement reached its apotheosis in the storming of the US Capitol building in January 2021 by Trump supporters convinced their man had been robbed of victory in the presidential election. QAnon activists were among their number, some flying banners promoting their beliefs.
More recently, there has been an apparent rise in conspiracy theories generated by, and subscribed to, by the American left. And as the race for the White House heats up, so have the counter-narratives among supporters of President Joe Biden.
After Biden’s disastrously stumbling performance in last month’s debate against Trump, some came up with their own outlandish explanations. He must have been drugged, it was claimed. Or, he must have had “Havana syndrome” (a mysterious malady that’s affected some US diplomats and been linked to a Russian intelligence unit). “Who else finds it interesting that President Biden has not looked like, sounded like, or acted like he did in the first 15 minutes of the debate in ONE. SINGLE. APPEARANCE. SINCE. THAT. NIGHT?” demanded a Biden-supporting podcaster with 255,400 X followers last week. “No one wants to talk about that.”
US President Joe Biden at a news conference during the NATO Summit in Washington. Photo / Getty Images
Unfounded rumours from Democrats are ripping through X, but also flourishing elsewhere on social media, including on the platform Threads and on TikTok. Nor are they the preserve of a rump of so-called keyboard warriors. More mainstream figures, too, are querying the narratives reported by mainstream media. Dmitri Mehlhorn, a political adviser to the Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, reportedly encouraged supporters in an email on Saturday to consider the possibility “that this ‘shooting’ was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash”.
He apologised the next day and said he regretted the email, according to the Washington Post. But he wasn’t the only one giving weight to the rumours. The American actor John Cusack wrote on X this week:
I hate conspiracy theories because they avoid the open conspiracies we see with our eyes - for rabbit hole nonsense - that said - It’s unthinkable that the secret service doesn’t cover the ONE ROOF staring at the stage - zero chance . Also, no secret service action in…
What is going on? Experts say social media undoubtedly plays a significant role in amplifying rumour and disinformation exponentially. “Conspiracy theories have existed for hundreds of years, but there is a sharp growth in the quantity and quality of conspiracy theories and believers,” says Dr Hugo Leal, a research associate at Cambridge University’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy. “This growth is linked to the enhanced capacity to create and diffuse [these theories]. Of course the internet is a central factor.”
The picture is further complicated by the fact that information isn’t only spread organically. Cyabra, an Israeli tech firm, found that 45 per cent of the accounts using hashtags such as #fakeassassination and #stagedshooting were inauthentic, or bots. This makes it harder to ascertain just how many people are genuinely buying into conspiracy theories. It also gives fringe theories far more prominence.
“They’re not new, it’s just they are more accessible both for those who believe but also for us,” says Dr Daniel Jolley, a social psychologist at the University of Nottingham, whose research explores the psychology of conspiracy theories. “[Some people] say it’s not the internet per se but it’s that these things become more visible [because of the internet].”
Meanwhile, modern democracies are facing a crisis of trust, which also helps to explain how conspiracy theories gain traction. “People don’t trust in any institution,” says Leal. “From the military to the church, to the state, to businesses.”
Lack of trust is again a necessary but not sufficient condition for the rise of conspiracy theories, he argues. To fully understand it, we also have to examine political cultures, news consumption habits and education. “You now have very entrenched and polarised political cultures,” says Leal.
For now, research shows there’s a much more prominent and pervasive conspiracist political culture on the right – as opposed to the left – in both the US and Britain, he says. “Trump voters are more likely to believe in the great replacement theory [which alleges international elites are trying to replace white citizens with non-white ones], in anti-vax theories and in global warming being a hoax.”
But as liberals’ baseless insinuations about what happened at Saturday’s rally indicates, susceptibility to conspiracy theories is not the sole preserve of one end of the political spectrum. Leal cautions against calling BlueAnon a conspiracy theory at the moment, preferring to frame it as a “rumour hodgepodge” which, unlike QAnon, has not been “weaponised for political purposes at scale yet”. While QAnon was owned and embraced by Republicans, BlueAnon “is a term coined by the American right and alt-right to create false equivalence”, he says.
But if the American left has not yet “weaponised disinformation” in the way QAnon did (Trump openly embraced the latter, while Biden and those around him have said nothing to support the idea that the attempted assassination of their rival was staged), that doesn’t necessarily mean they will remain immune, Leal warns. “This can change,” he says. “Political cultures are dynamic and I’d say it is a threat to the democratic political culture. It’s up to them to neither espouse nor promote these narratives.”
