New obstacle for news media covering mass shootings: Dodging and debunking bogus claims
Certain news outlets were fooled by white nationalists and coordinated internet trolls into publishing a false claim that the Florida school shooter was a member of an extremist group. The Republic of Florida told the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that Nikolas Cruz was part of their organization. Joan Donovan, a researcher of online fake news, “…called this an instance of ‘source hacking,’ a tactic by which fringe groups coordinate to feed false information to authoritative sources