Uploaded December 2017 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
In the hours after the shooting and during the succeeding days, false information and fake news about the shooter's identity and motive went viral on social media:
The website The Gateway Pundit misidentified the shooter when they named a different man and described him as a registered Democrat.[104]
A 4chan thread on which that misinformation of Gateway Pundit had been based had briefly featured in the "Top Stories" section of a Google search for the man's name.[105][106]
The fake news website YourNewsWire spread false information about a second gunman who was shooting from the fourth floor of the hotel.[107]
Two of Facebook's top trending pages were items from Sputnik, a Russian government news agency.[108][109] These included one story that falsely claimed the FBI had linked the shooter to a terrorist group.[110] The stories were later removed with an apology.[111]
Stories linking the shooter to Antifa have also been discredited.[112]
The terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) claimed that Paddock was their "soldier", and that he had answered Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's call to attack coalition countries,[113] but an FBI agent said they had found "no connection with an international terrorist group."[114] ISIS provided no evidence for its claim, and terrorism experts noted that since the Mosul liberation in October 2016, ISIS or Amaq News Agency has on at least two other occasions made false claims of responsibility for attacks with which they had no connection.[115][116][117]
Google and Facebook were criticized for displaying such false news stories in some of their search results.[111][118][119] The two technology companies were said to have failed in their responsibility of keeping false stories from reaching the public.[120] Facebook later said its algorithms were designed to detect and remove false stories, but failed to work adequately in this instance.[118]
In the aftermath of the shooting, some media outlets reported that YouTube search results for information about the shooting returned links to conspiracy videos. YouTube stated that it had tweaked its search algorithm to promote news sources which it considered more authoritative
In the hours after the shooting and during the succeeding days, false information and fake news about the shooter's identity and motive went viral on social media:
The website The Gateway Pundit misidentified the shooter when they named a different man and described him as a registered Democrat.[104]
A 4chan thread on which that misinformation of Gateway Pundit had been based had briefly featured in the "Top Stories" section of a Google search for the man's name.[105][106]
The fake news website YourNewsWire spread false information about a second gunman who was shooting from the fourth floor of the hotel.[107]
Two of Facebook's top trending pages were items from Sputnik, a Russian government news agency.[108][109] These included one story that falsely claimed the FBI had linked the shooter to a terrorist group.[110] The stories were later removed with an apology.[111]
Stories linking the shooter to Antifa have also been discredited.[112]
The terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) claimed that Paddock was their "soldier", and that he had answered Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's call to attack coalition countries,[113] but an FBI agent said they had found "no connection with an international terrorist group."[114] ISIS provided no evidence for its claim, and terrorism experts noted that since the Mosul liberation in October 2016, ISIS or Amaq News Agency has on at least two other occasions made false claims of responsibility for attacks with which they had no connection.[115][116][117]
Google and Facebook were criticized for displaying such false news stories in some of their search results.[111][118][119] The two technology companies were said to have failed in their responsibility of keeping false stories from reaching the public.[120] Facebook later said its algorithms were designed to detect and remove false stories, but failed to work adequately in this instance.[118]
In the aftermath of the shooting, some media outlets reported that YouTube search results for information about the shooting returned links to conspiracy videos. YouTube stated that it had tweaked its search algorithm to promote news sources which it considered more authoritative
