Fake, viral conspiracies on X overrun US politics

Most reporters, and most people who work in law enforcement, are familiar with litigants who want to put an official-looking masthead on sketchy information. Feinberg, who didn’t respond to an interview request, was filing non-notarized complaints, getting no traction, and posting videos that synced up the pages of her documents with pounding Christian rock music. Newsrooms see stories like this all the time and politely don’t cover them.

But less and less information comes from “newsrooms.” More and more news consumers distrust the “legacy” press, associate it with censorship and self-censorship. If something wild flies across their screens and newspapers aren’t running with it, that doesn’t mean it’s fake; that means the newspapers are compromised. And if the information is credibly proven to be fake, it must be a psyop or a distraction.

This is an evolving problem for politicians, especially Democrats, who have faced a series of odd hoaxes that got traction in new media — but not in the sorts of outlets that need to verify information before they run it. Last year, both Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were the subjects of medium-effort conspiracy theories, one with an AI-enhanced video of a fake woman claiming that Harris had disabled her in a hit-and-run, one with an AI-enhanced video of a “former Walz student” claiming that the ex-teacher had abused him.

The campaign didn’t elevate those stories by responding. The debunking was done by reporters, who chased down a Russian propaganda link in the fake Walz stories. But the new micro-influencer ecosystem loves this sort of stuff; Donald Trump has even been subjected to it. The Feinberg complaint, filed and dismissed last year, rocketed around X, with DIY gumshoes explaining that her claims were made “under oath” to hundreds of thousands of followers.

“If true, this will be one for the history books,” wrote Sarah Fields, a GOP activist in Texas, to her 293,000 X followers. Five hours later, she clarified her “personal opinion that the allegations towards him regarding involvement in the assassination of Donald Trump are likely not true.” The initial post was re-shared more than 14,000 times; the follow-up was shared less than 100 times. (The X post by “Aunt Kitty” that Ryan reacted to and quoted on Monday was shared more than 18,000 times.)

An optimist might look at this story, ponder the number of people who jumped into the replies to say it seemed fake, and see healthy antibodies to slander. A pessimist, like me, sees endless opportunities for people to get bogus accusations out into the discourse. How often do you see a link to a reported story, or a court filing, versus a screenshot of a headline or a paragraph? If the facts say that USAID didn’t send $100 million in condoms to Hamas, but the Trump family says it does, how many people believe the political fiction?

The accusation against Shapiro here was so bizarre that its potential audience shrunk within hours, and it probably won’t affect how voters see him. But every candidate — and Democrats see Shapiro as a 2028 presidential hopeful — will be operating in a new media environment where a high-traffic account can put basically any story into the news junkie’s bloodstream.

The flimsiness of the Shapiro accusation kept plenty of influencers away from it on Monday. The response was a lot like the pushback on the Harris and Walz hoaxes last year — that the evidence was so flimsy

“I don’t know about this Josh Shapiro ‘whistleblower,’” Jack Posobiec posted on Monday afternoon. “We’ve been seeing a lot of false flag docs lately — feels like a setup for a buffalo run.” That’s a term for false information used to discredit the people who fall for it, which Bongino suggested might be happening yesterday.

“They want you to run with some of this stuff, just like these deep state accounts that promote these liberal talking points because they want to use it later to discredit you,” he told listeners.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that Democrats need to choose when to refute misinformation; last week, she responded on X to a years-old viral claim that she’d become a multimillionaire in Congress.

“You can’t get distracted and play endless whack-a-mole, because then you know that is designed to really prevent us from being as effective and focused in our work,” she said. “But at the same time, there are certain key pieces of misinformation that I do think are important to tackle head-on.”

She hit back at the fake wealth story because “it cut to a very strong, foundational aspect of my politics and who I am as a person. If you allow certain things to grow legs and walk around, it will undercut any argument and any effort that you make. But there are, as we know, plenty of other pieces of misinformation that I’ll kind of let go by, because I’d never be able to do anything else if I was just constantly correcting the record on everything.”