Trump's assassination attempt conspiracies
Conspiracies about the assassination attempt got 215M+ views on X; 95% of posts had no fact-check.
Executive summary
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The Center for Countering Digital Hate manually collected 100 popular posts on X using search terms such as "staged," "false flag," and "deep state," restricted to posts with over 10,000 views published from July 13, 2024 onward, following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and checked each for fact-checking labels or Community Notes.
The sampled posts collectively drew more than 215 million views, with roughly 95% carrying no fact-check label; posts alleging the shooting was staged accounted for over 122 million views, and a smaller cluster of antisemitic posts falsely linking the incident to Jewish or Israeli involvement drew several million views.
The report concludes that X's engagement-driven algorithm and thin fact-checking coverage allowed high-profile conspiracy theories to circulate largely unchecked, and argues this illustrates a broader failure of platform moderation systems during a major breaking-news event.
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