On September 4, four people were killed at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, by a 14-year-old male suspect who surrendered and was taken into custody. This is now the deadliest mass shooting this year. The suspect, according to his father, “had some problems” at school, including “getting picked on” and “ridiculed…day after day after day.” His parents “went through a bitter separation and custody dispute” in recent years, including instances where they’ve “called law enforcement on each other.” The shooter was investigated in 2023, by local authorities for threats he made on the online chat platform Discord, which is often used by video game players to communicate with each other. Discord removed an account “believed to be associated” with the suspect in May 2023 for violating Discord’s policy against extremism. After searching his home this week, authorities found documents written by the suspect supposedly referencing prior school shootings.
Mass shootings and acts of violence serve as flashpoints for the far right and hateful extremists to spread their reprehensible rhetoric and baseless conspiracies, and this time is no different. Common throughlines across fringe platforms like Telegram, Gab, GETTR, Rumble, and Bitchute include theories that the shooting was planned by the government, false assertions that the shooter is transgender, and that the shooting is meant to influence the upcoming United States presidential elections.
On Telegram, whose founder Pavel Durov was recently arrested and charged for his platform’s alleged involvement in aiding money laundering, drug trafficking, and child pornography, several far-right groups and individuals attempted to stoke hate and spread disinformation. The Cape Fear Proud Boys suggested that the FBI allowed the shooting to happen “for election season.” A conspiratorial channel called “Shadow of Ezra,” with over 20,000 subscribers, suggested the CIA could be “manipulating mentally ill individuals, using psychotropic drugs to orchestrate school shootings” in order to “[disarm] U.S. citizens in the name of safety.” A channel dedicated to Steve Bannon’s podcast, War Room, claimed the shooting was manufactured by the “Deept (sic) Staters” who “creat[ed] a problem and then [used] it to grow government and take away individual rights and liberties.” Jeremy Mackenzie, de-facto leader of the Canadian white supremacist Diagolon movement, shared several images of Tweets falsely blaming a supposedly transgender person for being the shooter. He followed up by saying “How much of this has to happen before people will accept the premise that perhaps these people are dangerously mentally ill ?” The Proud Boys of Columbus made a similar post scapegoating the same person, while admitting that they “have no idea if this is accurate.”
On Gab, a social media platform with a similar interface to Twitter, users were quick to label the shooting as a “false flag,” which is a political or military operation carried out with the intention to blame an opponent, typically to spark a larger conflict. Racist users pushing the false flag theory purported that school shootings are “distraction[s]” planned by the government to “ensure that we focus” on them compared to “illegal alien communities” who are “killing citizens.” Others claimed that the “FBI groom kids, illegals, the mentally and or emotionaly (sic) challenged into shooters.” Conspiracies about distractions leading up to the presidential election were common, with some suggesting that a mass shooting “just two months before the election” is suspicious, with one person saying “If you didn’t have ‘school shooting’ on your election BINGO card, you aren’t paying attention.” Just like on Telegram, rumors that the shooter is transgender spread quickly, with one user somehow extrapolating that the shooter is a Kamala Harris supporter and was therefore “allow[ed]” by the FBI to commit the atrocity, as it would be “a way to help the Democrat Party push for gun control in election years.”
On GETTR, also a Twitter-like platform, similar theories gained traction. Users were accusing the FBI of “encouraging, orchestrating, and even funding some or all of these mass shootings so #democratcommunist politicians can push #guncontrol.” Others thought the mass shooting was planned to influence the upcoming election, saying “just watch the election narrative change,” that the shooting is “right on schedule” for “Biden/Harris,” and sarcastically claiming that there’s “no coincidence” in the shooting happening “60 days out” from the election. One violent comment said “no surprise a school shooting today in the key Battle ground state of Georgia. There are no coincidences and put nothing past the evil we are up against. If they cheat and take this election, the only way out from their tyranny is civil war and mass death.“
On Rumble, a video-hosting platform which hosted RNC debates, video comment sections shared false flag narratives. Comments blamed the mass shooting on MKUltra, which was a CIA program attempting “to produce a perfect truth drug for use in interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War, and generally to explore any other possibilities of mind control, called mass shootings “a FBI created crisis,” and claimed that any “school shooting bullshit” is a “sheeple narrative,” similar to mass shootings in “Parkland, Uvalde, the Buffalo grocery store, and Nashville” being supposedly “orchestrated by the Deep State.”
On Bitchute, a video-hosting platform, comment sections pushed the false flag narrative by calling it an “old staged school shooting.” Others blamed it on Jews, saying “I stopped caring about school shooting (sic) in jewmerica back in the 90’s…I would suggest 90% of them are false flag operations by the corrupt jew government and alphabet agencies.”
