Headline : Mass shootings: the other innocent victims

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Every time there is a mass shooting in the United States, innocent people get blamed, falsely identified on social media as the shooter, writes AFP’s Bill McCarthy, who has debunked many of the fake posts

The news, flashed across a television in AFP’s Washington bureau, told a story that has become numbingly familiar in America.  A heavily-armed shooter had opened fire inside the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, adding six more names to the long list of innocents killed by gun violence in the United States. Three were children, all nine years old, massacred by a stranger.

Whenever another mass shooting happens, my heart sinks – not just for the victims, their loved ones and the communities shattered by grief. It sinks because I also know from my work as a digital investigation journalist for AFP’s North America fact-checking team that other blameless people will be falsely accused of being the killer, their pictures shared all over the web by social media users.

I have seen the pattern play out over and over. Every time a mass shooting happens, a misinformation story begins. After February’s shooting at Michigan State University, a writer from Massachusetts who had nothing to do with the attack was blamed by a hoaxer on Twitter, complete with a fake Facebook post mocked up in his likeness.

Read more from the original article on here at correspondent.afp.com.

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