False Reports Circulate About Brown University Shooting

In the wake of the tragic shooting at Brown University, misinformation experts are pointing to a troubling pattern that has emerged in our information ecosystem. The response to this incident highlights how rapidly unfounded claims can spread from fringe corners into mainstream discourse, with elected officials sometimes amplifying unverified information before facts are established.

“Acts of mass violence are prone to this sort of rumor-spread, misinformation, where no one knows what’s going on,” explains Adam Berinsky, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You’d like to think that responsible politicians during times of uncertainty would help turn down the temperature but in the current situation, they’re basically cranking it up.”

As of Tuesday evening, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha emphasized that investigators had “zero” information about the shooter’s motives. “There’s nothing… that indicates any kind of motive that is related at all to ethnicity or political outlook or culture,” Neronha stated firmly, pushing back against a wave of speculation that had already gained traction online.

Despite this lack of evidence, social media platforms have been flooded with unverified claims about the shooter’s identity, political affiliations, and motivations. Brown University has already been forced to issue a statement condemning “harmful doxxing activity” targeting at least one member of the university community.

The shooting claimed the lives of two students: Ella Cook, who served as vice president of Brown’s College Republicans chapter, and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, a freshman and aspiring neurosurgeon who was a devout Muslim and immigrant from Uzbekistan. According to Umurzokov’s sisters, he had attended the economics review session where the shooting occurred to accompany a friend.

Several Republican members of Congress have publicly suggested—without evidence—that the shooting was politically motivated due to Cook’s affiliation with the College Republicans. Representative Brandon Gill of Texas wrote on X that “left wing political violence is unfortunately increasing,” while New York Representative Claudia Tenney claimed conservatives have “been targeted again and again” and that “people need to pay attention to what is happening on the left.”

Rhode Island Democratic Representative Seth Magaziner countered these narratives, urging the public not to pay attention to unverified theories circulating online that might “stoke more fear.”

Disinformation researchers note that periods of uncertainty following tragic events create fertile ground for misinformation. This tendency has intensified since 2016, coinciding with declining trust in traditional news sources and reduced fact-checking on platforms like X.

“The trend of politicians capitalizing on violence to build support has seemingly grown in recent years, and been made more immediate by the ubiquity of social media,” said David Rand, professor at MIT. Many influencers and politicians have “really embraced conspiracy theorizing,” in part because “content that is more sensational gets more engagement online and therefore gets promoted by the social media algorithms.”

Nora Benavidez, an attorney at Free Press, an advocacy group fighting online disinformation, emphasized that “acts of violence and the kind of grief that follow these acts are not moments to be exploited.” Yet increasingly, “leaders in the highest levels of office trot out falsities and unproven or untested theories that sway people because they’re emotional in those moments after such violent acts.”

The problem is compounded by social media algorithms that create vastly different information environments for users based on their political leanings. “We actually don’t know what people are seeing about the Brown shooting because our information environments are cluttered, they’re chaotic,” Benavidez noted.

Sander van der Linden, a University of Cambridge psychologist who studies misinformation, highlighted a particularly challenging aspect of the current landscape: “The US is in a particularly difficult situation because a lot of the misinformation is coming from official authorities.”

Experts advise the public to rely on official sources and be aware that some political actors may be deliberately spreading confusion to advance their agendas during these sensitive moments.