As details emerge in Sunday's mass shooting near Las Vegas' Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, hoaxes have begun to pop up on social media as some users attempt to get attention for themselves or their pages.
With at least 58 people dead, multiple missing persons photos were tweeted with heart-wrenching pleas, but the photos were of celebrities or others unrelated to the shooting, USA Today reported.
One user whose account appears to have been suspended claimed his father was missing in Vegas but showed an image of adult film star Johnny Sins, USA Today reported. Another user tweeted her son was missing, but then commented, “While y’all here follow me on Instagram!”
Many also posted false pictures of a shooting suspect, including identifying the shooter as a Muslim terrorist, BuzzFeed reported.
Conservative media personality Wayne Allen Root posted to his 110,000 followers that the shooting was a “clearly coordinated Muslim terror attack,” then claimed in a later tweet that “police & credible news sources” gave him that information when his post was debunked.
Root also claimed that shots were fired at other Las Vegas-area resorts, which no other evidence has supported, Time reported.
Nelba Marquez-Greene, the mother of a Sandy Hook shooting victim, said in a Twitter comment Monday that she has been contacted even five years later by those spreading hoaxes about the 2012 school shooting there in which 26 children were killed.
The Gateway Pundit also posted an article about a person named Geary Danley who was believed to be connected to the shooter’s companion Marilou Danley, suggesting that he had ties to left-wing, Trump-hating groups, but minutes later took the article down and said it was a mistake, BuzzFeed reported.