By Christine Soares
Confusion and conspiracy theories spread online after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot during a university appearance in Orem, Utah, on Wednesday.
As the manhunt continued, online speculation, much of it baseless, emerged about the circumstances of the shooting and the identity of the shooter.
Online posts also shared fake headlines about the killing, or real headlines with fake timestamps to claim the media had advance knowledge of the plan. And social media users trying to get clarity from AI chatbots found they were misled.
Reuters has examined some of the viral rumors, conspiracies, and false information spreading online in the aftermath of Kirk’s death.
MISIDENTIFIED SUSPECTS
Video shared online in the aftermath of the shooting shows an older man being detained by Provo police and an officer holding a rifle, which the voiceover said belonged to the suspect. But there is no evidence the encounter was related to the Kirk shooting. The Utah Department of Public Safety did not respond to a request for comment.
One video posted within hours of Kirk’s shooting falsely identified a Black man 700 miles (1,126 km) away as having been arrested for killing Kirk. But the video is from June and shows the arrest of a suspect in a Santa Monica police officer shooting. The same video was shared by Fox News that month.
Other posts shared video of a man on the run after a gunman opened fire outside a casino in Reno, Nevada, on July 28, a shooting that killed three and injured three others. The posts claimed it was footage of Kirk’s shooter.
The image of a 29-year-old Washington state resident was shared in a series of posts baselessly suggesting the shooter is transgender. She told Reuters in a message the picture had been lifted from her X account without her knowledge, adding that she was in Seattle at the time of the shooting. She wrote earlier on Instagram, after her image circulated widely online, that she is not the shooter.At the time of writing, authorities have not said the suspect is transgender.
HEADLINE FAKES
Dark memes following the shooting included a fabricated CNN headline dated 2021 that quotes Kirk as saying, “If Somebody Ever Shoots Me Through The Neck During A Speech In Utah In 2025, I Lowkey Think That Rocks.”
There is no evidence Kirk ever made this statement. A CNN spokesperson said in an email, “This is a fabricated image and CNN never published a story with that headline.”
A screenshot of a genuine New York Times headline appearing in Google search results was used to suggest the media knew about the shooting in advance. The headline, “Charlie Kirk is Apparently Shot During Utah Valley University Event,” as it appeared in Google, was shared in an X post after the shooting and captioned, “NY Times 19 hours ago (last night 15 hours before shooting) is standard CIA pysop.”
An archive of the article shows the first post on the outlet’s live blog was published after Kirk’s shooting, at 3:02 p.m. ET.
The New York Times said in an email that the page went live at 3:01 p.m. ET on Wednesday.
This timestamp discrepancy in search engine results can happen when a web page provides a time zone different from the local time when it was published, or when multiple dates are listed on the page, a Google spokesperson said.
“Given the low resolution and incomplete screenshots, we’re not able to confirm if these are Google Search results,” the spokesperson said in an email. “We provide guidance to site owners about how they can help us identify the most accurate date and time to show in Search.”
AI CHATBOTS AMPLIFY CONFUSION
In the aftermath of Kirk’s shooting, Reuters found that both Perplexity’s bot account and xAI’s Grok chatbot provided incorrect responses to queries on X.
In response to a query beneath a clip condemning Kirk’s killing, Perplexity’s bot account incorrectly said the individual was describing a “hypothetical scenario” and that Kirk was “still alive.”
It also responded to a graphic released by the White House that featured a statement on the incident, saying that it appeared to be “fabricated,” incorrectly adding that there had been “no official confirmation” by the White House that Kirk had died.
Early online rumors falsely suggested that a man named Michael Mallinson had been detained by police. This was elevated by Grok, which cited unspecified “reports” that he was in custody. In later posts, Grok said Mallinson had been “falsely accused.” Mallinson could not be reached for comment.
Grok also labelled a real statement as fabricated, incorrectly saying that a screenshot of the statement released by Turning Point USA, the conservative student group founded by Kirk, appeared to be “fake.”
A spokesperson for Perplexity told Reuters, “Because we take the topic so seriously, Perplexity never claims to be 100% accurate. But we do claim to be the only AI company working on it relentlessly as our core focus.”
xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Reporting credits: Seana Davis, Carmel Jaeslin, Shruthi, Neha, Anagha, Reuters Fact Check; Editing by Rod Nickel)
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