• They are saying that the bullet might have been up to some conspiracy stuff. I’m dumb as shit, and even I got that first read. C’mon. The bullet might have been from one of those Disney movies, or straight from the acme factory. You don’t know.

        For real though, don’t take life so seriously. It’s hard to find humor in serious events where people died, don’t get me wrong, but at the same time a little bit of color might bring a bit of joy or a laugh to someone at a time when everyone is trying to get us to all focus on darkness.

  • with the platform promoting topics including “#falseflag” and “staged” to users. X owner Elon Musk has staunchly advocated for “free speech” on social media platforms — which can include misinformation like the above.

    This is a kindergarten-level theory of mind failure. This is extremely embarrassing for The Verge.

    Nobody knows whether it was staged or false flag. Speculation is not misinformation. Conflating these two reveals this writer doesn’t understand the nature of the mind at the most basic level. They’re assuming the truth is something transparently obvious to all, which is at its heart the root of the totalitarian approach to decision making.

    • Speculation is not misinformation.

      I’m going to disagree with you there. Speculating is misinformation when the audience is too stupid to tell the difference. We’re talking about conservatives here, so I mean…if the speculation is telling them what they want to hear, then they will take it as absolute truth.

      • We’re talking about leftists here. The #staged and #flaseflag ideas are conspiracy theories that the would-be assassin was actually planted by Trump to boost his campaign. These are theorized by people that don’t like Trump.

        • i think this is maybe a case of the conversation has moved quickly over the course of two days, and we are talking about different things. It is true, this article is about speculation from tweeters, and we don’t know much about those tweeters from this article, but it does sound like leftist posts from Saturday and Sunday. I think I was commenting from a place of the knowledge we have as of today, which didn’t really apply to what I was replying to. It is true that The Verge’s reporting was maybe irresponsible here

  • It’s been all over the left-leaning Lemmy instances too. It seems there are a lot of copers living in an alternate reality where Trump is on track to lose the election and needs to resort to killing his own supporters in a fake assassination attempt to boost his popularity. Sorry to break it to you guys, but in the real world there was absolutely zero need for Trump to take the spotlight away from Biden’s spectacularly awful debate performance and the age/replacement question, which has been front-page news ever since.

  • 🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

    Click here to see the summary

    Conspiracy theories about the shooting at a rally for Donald Trump began surfacing on X shortly after the news broke this afternoon, with the platform promoting topics including “#falseflag” and “staged” to users.

    X owner Elon Musk has staunchly advocated for “free speech” on social media platforms — which can include misinformation like the above.

    Bloomberg reported yesterday that Musk donated to a super PAC supporting Trump, giving a “sizable amount” to reelection efforts.

    Musk has taken on increasingly conservative views in recent years, promoting the “great replacement” conspiracy theory and endorsing support for white pride.

    Facebook’s search results primarily pointed to news outlets; the platform removed its trending topics section in 2018 over constant complaints about its curation.

    Threads occasionally displayed conspiracy-related posts atop its trending topic for the incident, but they didn’t appear to surface consistently.


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