Early last Monday morning, a few hours after the horrific shooting on the Las Vegas Strip, group-members of the far-right began reporting that they knew who the killer was. The reports were a mistake. Nonetheless, far-righters continued to identify an innocent man as committing the massacre. Even more harmful was that these meddlers combed through his Facebook page searching for fodder to make their assumption right. Members on the far-right inhaled every tidbit that could confirm their belief that the shooting was the result of a crazed far-left socialist.

Specifically, A pro-Trump blog, "The Gateway Pundit" a blog credentialed by the White House as not fake news, published an article the morning after the massacre promoting a conspiracy theory and misidentifying the killer. Notwithstanding, by "The Gateway Pundit's" own account, the blog brags on it's website that; "[an] early 2017 study found 'The Gateway Pundit' was [the] 4th most influential Right-Leaning Media Outlet during last year’s election."

The blunder may have been caused by similar names

The Washington Post reports that a possible cause for the blunder was that the police were looking for the gunman's girlfriend, Marilou Danley. Additionally, the misidentified man and a Marilou Danley may have been married at one point in time.

Police were searching for the gunman's girlfriend who bears the same name. Police reported that Marilou Danley was, most probably, not involved in the shooting. Nonetheless, they needed to question her. Since then Marilou Danley, the killer's girlfriend, has returned to The United States from the Philippines. By all accounts, Danley appears to be cooperating with the investigation.

Nonetheless, far-right internet posters did not seem to care about vetting their information before they took the careless, negligent position that an innocent man was a mass murderer. Moreover, a passing read of the man's Facebook page implied that he might be a liberal. Therefore, it seems that, in the minds of some far-right internet aficionados, liberal equals being capable of committing mass murder.

Algorithms cause an innocent man to be named as the killer

Meanwhile, authorities have named the actual gunman, after the swat team found him dead in his hotel room. A room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel where he was perched in his deadly destructive commitment to mass murder. Regardless, the spurious internet posts swiftly rooted into the algorithms of Google and Facebook, where sites validating the un-vetted rumor made its way to the top of a search for the man's name. The Washington Post would later denounce the far-right internet trolls by pointing out that by 9:00 AM last Monday the misidentified man was still at the top of search results on Google, when, in fact, the shooter had been identified by police and the misidentified man had nothing to do with the mass murder.

The question is why do far-right internet trolls have hair-trigger reactions to blame so-called liberals. Had the man's Facebook page made him appear conservative would the right-wing cling to that? No way! However, what would liberals do if the false finger of fake news pointed to a conservative as the mass murderer?