ANALYSIS: After the Blood, the Lies — How Conspiracy Theories Are Taking Over the Discussion of U.S. Shootings

Why this event, why tonight?

For decades, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has been an ideological target for a certain segment of the American right. It embodies—rightly or wrongly—the supposed collusion between political power and the media. Trump boycotted it. His supporters turned it into a symbol of the corrupt elite. In this context, a shooting occurring on the same evening, in the same city, is ideal fodder for conspiracy theories. The temporal coincidence becomes evidence. The geographical proximity becomes intent. The human brain seeks connections—it’s in its nature. The architects of organized deception have understood this and exploit it with cold precision.

This isn’t stupidity. It’s narrative engineering. Take two real events—the dinner, the shooting—and build a fictional bridge between them. This bridge doesn’t need to be solid. It just needs to be credible for forty-eight hours—just long enough for the disinformation to take hold. By the time the denial arrives, people have already moved on—but the theory remains.

What strikes me is the speed. The shooting takes place. And within the next minute, someone, somewhere, already has a ready-made theory. As if it were waiting. As if the lie were prepared in advance, ready to be deployed on any event. This isn’t a reaction. It’s production.

The ecosystem that fuels the machine

In 2023, a study by the MIT Media Lab showed that false information spreads six times faster than true information on social media. Six times. And conspiracy theories linked to violent events spread even faster than average—because they combine two of the most powerful fuels for human attention: fear and the sense of belonging to a group that “knows.” Believing in a conspiracy theory means believing you’re smarter than the masses. It’s a real psychological reward. And platforms that monetize engagement have no interest in eliminating it.

Elon Musk has laid off 80% of X’s moderation teams since his acquisition in October 2022. Meta announced in January 2025 that it was ending its fact-checking programs in the United States. YouTube has relaxed its rules on conspiracy-theory content. In this landscape, the theories that followed Saturday night’s shooting encountered no institutional resistance. They found a free-for-all.

Step One: Uncertainty as Raw Material

In the first few minutes after a shooting, information is scarce, fragmentary, and contradictory. This is normal—it’s the reality of chaos. Witnesses give different accounts. Law enforcement secures the scene before releasing any information. The media publish partial reports that they later correct. This delay between the event and verification—this lull of uncertainty—is precisely the moment conspiracy theorists choose to step in. They don’t wait for the truth. They fill the void that the truth hasn’t yet had time to fill.

And once they’ve taken hold, they don’t let go. Disinformation has a quality that the truth lacks: it doesn’t need to be consistent. A conspiracy theory can contradict itself from one version to the next, absorb denials as “further evidence of the cover-up,” and evolve as new revelations emerge without ever admitting it was wrong. The truth, on the other hand, is rigid. It must correspond to the facts. A lie is flexible. That is its competitive advantage.

People sometimes ask me why I keep writing about this topic. Why not “ignore” conspiracy theories—why not deny them a platform by even mentioning them? The answer is simple: ignorance has never made an infection go away. It has merely given it time to spread.

Step Two: Casting the Culprits

Every conspiracy theory needs a culprit. In the case of Saturday’s shooting, several “culprits” circulated simultaneously—the Biden administration (since ousted but still useful as a bogeyman), the “deep state,” the “global elites,” George Soros (accused of funding just about every event unfavorable to the American right over the past twenty years). These figures are interchangeable. Their identity matters less than their function: to provide an enemy. For without an enemy, there is no conspiracy. And without a conspiracy, there is no community united by a shared hatred of that enemy.

It is the sociological structure of conspiracy theories that researcher Kathleen Blee, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and specialist in extremist movements, describes as “the making of ‘us’”: creating a collective identity around a shared threat, whether real or imagined. QAnon supporters did not rally around a belief. They rallied around a sense of belonging. The belief was the ticket to entry.

Fact-checking That Comes Too Late

And yet, it would be too simplistic to place all the blame on platforms and conspiracy theorists. Traditional media outlets have their share of responsibility in this story. Not because they lie—but because they often arrive too late. A debunking by The New York Times or CNN, however thorough it may be, appears hours or days after the theory has already gone around the world three times. Fact-checking is a remedy. But what we need is prevention.

There is also the issue of the coverage itself. Mentioning a conspiracy theory in order to debunk it gives it a life it might not otherwise have had. This is the paradox of fact-checking: in trying to put out the fire, we sometimes fan the flames. Researchers at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford documented this phenomenon as early as 2019—the “backfire effect”—showing that under certain conditions, debunking actually reinforces conspiracy beliefs rather than eroding them.

I know that this article itself is caught up in this contradiction. By naming these theories, I amplify them somewhat. But silence is not an option. Silence has been tried. It didn’t work. So I’m taking the other risk: naming, contextualizing, and trusting the reader to distinguish between information and its poisoning.

The Impossible Race Between Truth and Speed

A serious journalist verifies before publishing. A conspiracy theorist publishes before verifying—and never verifies. This discrepancy in process creates a systematic speed gap. Truth runs with leaden soles. Lies run barefoot. And in the attention economy, speed is everything. The first version of an event that reaches a reader often becomes their definitive version, regardless of any subsequent corrections.

That is why platforms are a battlefield, not a mere footnote. Elon Musk’s decision to scale back moderation on X is not a matter of abstract free speech. It is a decision that has measurable consequences for real families, in real cities, in the wake of real tragedies. The victims of Saturday night will read things about themselves in the coming days. False things. Cruel things. Because someone decided that engagement was more important than the truth.

Twelve Years of Institutionalized Harassment

On December 14, 2012, at 9:35 a.m., Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. He killed twenty children between the ages of six and seven, and six staff members. It was one of the worst school shootings in American history. In the hours that followed, theories began to circulate. In the weeks that followed, they turned into an industry.

Robbie Parker, whose six-year-old daughter Emilie was killed that day, smiled as he approached a microphone the next day to speak about his daughter. It was a forced smile—the kind you put on to keep from completely falling apart. That smile was captured, taken out of context, and shared millions of times with the caption: “A real grieving father doesn’t smile.” Robbie Parker has received death threats for years. His daughter Emilie, declared an actress by strangers on the internet, was insulted posthumously in thousands of messages. She was six years old. She loved the arts. She had drawn a card for a friend the day before she died.

Sandy Hook should have been the moment when America said: Enough is enough. When the platforms said: Enough is enough. When lawmakers said: Enough is enough. Instead, we got trials that lasted ten years, a conviction that didn’t stop the next conspiracy theory, and a conspiracy-theory infrastructure stronger than it was in 2012. This isn’t a failure. It’s a choice.

Alex Jones’s Conviction: Victory or Illusion?

In August 2022, Alex Jones was found guilty of defamation by a Texas court. The total amount of damages he was ordered to pay to the Sandy Hook families came to approximately $1.5 billion—later reduced to $49 million after review. InfoWars filed for bankruptcy. Alex Jones had to sell his assets. But InfoWars continues to exist. Alex Jones continues to broadcast. And the conspiracy theories about the shootings haven’t disappeared with him. They’ve diffracted into a thousand other voices, a thousand other channels, a thousand other platforms that are less visible but just as effective.

Alex Jones’s conviction was necessary. It was just. It was not enough. Because the problem isn’t Alex Jones. Alex Jones is a symptom. The problem is an ecosystem that makes the industrial-scale production of lies about shooting victims profitable. Convicting a producer without shutting down the factory is like arresting a drug dealer while leaving the cartel intact.

Scrolling as Participation

We’ve all scrolled. We’ve all seen a conspiracy theory flash by and kept scrolling without flagging it, without commenting, without taking action. Sometimes out of exhaustion. Sometimes out of resignation. Sometimes because we thought our individual action wouldn’t make a difference. But algorithms don’t count intentions. They count interactions. Every view is a data point. Every share—even when done to debunk something—amplifies the message. We are all, to varying degrees, cogs in the machine we decry.

This is not an accusation. It is a mechanical description. The architecture of these platforms was designed so that our natural behavior—curiosity, outrage, sharing—serves their commercial interests. We aren’t naive. We’re trapped in a system that exploits us. The difference between understanding this mechanism and continuing to contribute to it unconsciously—that’s exactly where something important is at stake.

I don’t place myself above this. I clicked. I shared to “counter” it. I helped spread theories while believing I was fighting them. We learn. Or we try to. What I know is that awareness without a change in behavior isn’t awareness—it’s just window dressing.

The Right Not to Know Immediately

There is a right that we have collectively abandoned: the right not to know right away. After a shooting, after an attack, after a disaster, we rush to our phones—not to get verified information, but to get something, anything, immediately. And the purveyors of conspiracy theories have understood this demand. They respond with a speed that serious journalism cannot match. They satisfy our need for an explanation with fabricated explanations. Because the void is unbearable. And a bad explanation is, psychologically, more comforting than no explanation at all.

Learning to tolerate temporary uncertainty—to say, “I don’t know yet, and that’s okay”—is not a surrender. It is a form of resistance. It is refusing to be the impatient consumer that these systems need us to be in order to function.

The tools exist. What’s missing is the will.

In 2020, Twitter had implemented a system of warning labels on misleading content—applied in particular to Donald Trump’s tweets claiming that mail-in voting was fraudulent. The system was imperfect. It was controversial. But it existed. In 2022, Elon Musk dismantled it. Since then, X has had fewer human moderators than any other major comparable platform. “Community notes”—the participatory fact-checking system meant to replace professional moderation—arrive too late for viral content and are themselves subject to manipulation.

Meta, for its part, announced in January 2025 that it was ending its partnership program with independent fact-checkers in the United States. Mark Zuckerberg presented this decision as a return to “freedom of expression.” In practice, it is the elimination of the only mechanism for slowing the spread of viral disinformation that Facebook had managed to build over eight years. The decision was made two weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration. The timing did not go unnoticed by observers.

Freedom of speech is a genuine value. I defend it. But freedom of speech does not mean that a private company is obligated to amplify lies about victims of mass shootings. These are two distinct things that very powerful actors have an interest in conflating. And they are doing so successfully.

Europe as a Mirror

The European Digital Services Act, which took effect in 2024, imposes obligations on major platforms to moderate illegal content and ensure transparency regarding their algorithms. Penalties for noncompliance can reach 6% of global revenue—which, for Meta, amounts to approximately seven billion dollars. This framework is imperfect. It is contested. It is insufficient. But it exists. It creates a legal constraint where none existed before.

In the United States, the First Amendment protects free speech from government interference—not from civil liability, as Sandy Hook demonstrated. But regulation of digital platforms remains in its infancy. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields platforms from any legal liability for their users’ content—a protection that dates back to 1996, before the modern internet even existed, and which no one in Congress seems to have the political courage to reform.

Those Who Keep Going Despite It All

Leonard Pozner doesn’t get much sleep. Since the death of his son Noah at Sandy Hook in December 2012, he has founded the HONR Network—an organization that tracks down, reports, and has conspiracy-theory content about shooting victims removed. He did it alone at first. Then, with a few volunteers. Over the years, he has had hundreds of thousands of pieces of abusive content removed from platforms. He has received death threats. He has moved. He keeps going.

With every new mass shooting, he knows his phone will ring. He knows families will write to him, terrified to discover that their lost loved ones are being accused of being actors. He explains the process to them. He helps them file complaints. He tells them they don’t have to do this alone. He is a man who decided that his pain would serve a purpose. This isn’t heroism. It’s sheer tenacity. And it’s one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen in this field.

Leonard Pozner is doing the work that the platforms—with their billions of dollars—refuse to do. He does it for free. He does it while carrying a grief that no one should ever have to bear. If that doesn’t say something about where the responsibility lies in this story, I don’t know what would.

And yet, they keep fighting

And yet, the Sandy Hook families have won. Not completely. Not definitively. But they’ve won a lawsuit that everyone told them not to file. They’ve proven that a purveyor of conspiracy theories can be held legally liable for harm caused to real victims. That precedent now exists. It can be invoked. It can be expanded.

And yet, organizations like First Draft, the Global Fact-Checking Network, and hundreds of local newsrooms continue to fact-check, correct, and document—with budgets infinitely smaller than those of the platforms spreading the lies they strive to counter. This work is exhausting. It is often invisible. It is indispensable. Not because it always wins. But because giving up would be the only certain defeat.

The Cost of Conspiracy Theories to Investigations

U.S. law enforcement agencies spend considerable resources dealing with the fallout from conspiracy theories after every mass shooting. Witnesses who refuse to speak out because they’re afraid of being “identified” in conspiracy videos. Families receive threats to the point where they can no longer access their phones. Police officers must refute fabricated “evidence” captured on surveillance cameras that no one has verified. This time is time that is not devoted to the actual investigation.

After the shooting at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas in October 2017—60 dead, 413 people wounded by gunfire—the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history—investigators estimated that hundreds of hours of work had been spent refuting conspiracy theories claiming the existence of “multiple shooters” or government involvement. Those hours are lost forever. Those resources will not be recouped.

We often talk about the human cost of conspiracy theories. We talk less about the operational cost—the collective energy wasted fighting phantoms while real issues—gun control, mental health, public safety—remain stagnant. Lies don’t just cost the victims. They cost society as a whole—in resources, time, and trust.

The Mental Health of the Forgotten Witnesses

A study published in 2021 in the Journal of Traumatic Stress documented what researchers call “double grief”—the phenomenon whereby families of victims of high-profile mass shootings suffer not only from their loss but also from the additional trauma caused by conspiracy-driven harassment. This secondary trauma has measurable consequences: prolonged depression, exacerbated post-traumatic stress disorder, and social isolation. It is not accounted for in official shooting reports. It does not appear in the statistics. But it exists, in the bodies and minds of people who had already lost enough.

Firsthand witnesses—those who saw it, those who ran, those who survived—are also targeted. Survivors of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018, have testified that they were harassed for years by people convinced that they were “playing a role.” Emma González, who became a gun control activist after surviving the massacre that killed seventeen of her classmates, received regular death threats all the way through college. She was seventeen when the shooting took place.

Who benefits from information chaos?

Behind every conspiracy theory about a mass shooting lies a more difficult question: Who benefits from doubt? Who stands to gain from a public unable to distinguish between what is real and what is fabricated? The answer isn’t simple. It’s multifaceted. It includes actors with a financial stake in the confusion—platforms that monetize engagement, conspiracy theory websites that sell dietary supplements and online courses to their paranoid audiences. It also includes political actors who have an interest in keeping the debate on gun control mired in narrative wars.

The National Rifle Association—with 5.5 million reported members and tens of millions of dollars in annual political contributions—has never produced a conspiracy theory. It doesn’t need to. The information chaos that follows every mass shooting serves its purposes well enough. When the public no longer knows who to believe, it stops voting for new regulations. Uncertainty is the best protection against change. And those who benefit from the status quo know this all too well.

What I’m about to write will upset some readers. So be it. It’s not a conspiracy theory to say that certain powerful actors benefit from informational chaos. It’s a structural observation. Informational chaos isn’t neutral. It has winners. And the winners aren’t the victims of mass shootings.

And yet, the truth endures

And yet. The truth persists. It is slow. It is underfunded. It is fought by forces infinitely better equipped in terms of resources and speed. But it persists. The lawsuits against Alex Jones have succeeded. The refutations by ballistics experts regarding the “multiple shooters” in Las Vegas have finally prevailed in the public debate. The families of Sandy Hook spoke out, again and again, until their voices pierced through the wall of noise.

The truth is fragile. It is not dead. It needs to be carried by people who accept fatigue, who refuse to give in to resignation, who understand that this fight will not be won in a single generation. The families of victims who file lawsuits. Fact-checkers who publish their corrections even when no one reads them. Columnists who write articles about conspiracy theories, knowing full well that the people who need to read them probably won’t.

A shooting. A dinner. A city that carries on

on the day after the shooting. The correspondents’ dinner had ended. Speeches had been given. Photos had been taken. A few blocks away, investigators were collecting shell casings from the sidewalk. Families were waiting for news in hospital hallways. Witnesses were giving their statements, still trembling with adrenaline.

And on X, on Telegram, on obscure forums that most people have never heard of, theories continued to multiply like cancer cells—rapid, invasive, impossible to contain entirely. Some would reach the victims’ families. Some would terrify them. Some would make them doubt, for a second, their own reality. Because when a thousand people tell you that what you’ve experienced doesn’t exist, it takes tremendous strength not to waver.

I saw that strength in families who had no reason to need it. It shouldn’t be necessary. But it is. And as long as it’s necessary, something fundamental has failed in this country—in our democracies—that we claim to defend.

The Final Question

There’s one thing conspiracy theorists can’t explain. Not an inconsistency in their narrative—they have dozens of them, and they’re perfectly comfortable with them. No, there is something simpler, more brutal: why do families who have nothing to gain, who have everything to lose, who are grieving a loss from which no one should ever be able to recover—why do they continue to name their dead, to testify, to take men more powerful than themselves to court?

The answer isn’t in their lawyers. It isn’t in their courage, even though they have it. It lies in something simpler: their children existed. Their brothers existed. Their parents existed. And no theory, no algorithm, no billion-dollar conspiracy infrastructure can erase that fact.

Noah Pozner was six years old. He loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He had lost his first baby tooth three weeks before his death. His father kept the tooth.

Conspiracy theorists can say whatever they want.

The tooth is real.

Signed, Maxime Marquette, columnist