Influencers play detective — and unleash chaos

As police scoured New England this week for the gunman who killed two people at Brown University, a parallel manhunt erupted online, falsely targeting a Palestinian student.Authorities say the real suspect, a Portuguese national also linked to the slaying of an MIT professor, was found dead Thursday in New Hampshire.Why it matters: Social media influencers who play detective after tragedies are getting it disastrously wrong — falsely accusing innocent people of crimes with little evidence, massive reach and virtually no accountability.The speculation often is stoked by ideological accounts that seize on "clues" reinforcing their worldviews. Corrections are exceedingly rare — and seldom travel as far as the original claims.Zoom in: Mustapha Kharbouch was never named by police as a suspect in the shooting that killed two Brown students, including the vice president of the college Republican Club.But he was targeted online after his student profile disappeared from the university's website — a move MAGA-aligned accounts seized on as supposed evidence of a cover-up.Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said Tuesday there were many reasons the pages could have been taken down — including to prevent doxxing — and warned that online vigilantes were heading down a "really dangerous road."But the frenzy only accelerated from there.Popular right-wing figures and large anonymous accounts cast Kharbouch's identity — Palestinian, openly queer and outspoken on Gaza — as inherently suspicious.Some accounts even cited amateur "gait analysis" of Kharbouch at a pro-Palestinian protest as supposed evidence that he was the shooter, alleging he was a product of campus extremism."The past few days have been an unimaginable nightmare," Kharbouch said in a statement. "I woke up Tuesday morning to unfounded, vile, Islamophobic, and anti-Palestinian accusations being directed toward me online.""Instead of grieving with my community in the aftermath of the horrible shooting, I received non-stop death threats and hate speech," he added, before noting that his harassment is "nothing" compared to the plight of Palestinians.Kharbouch's lawyers said his web pages were taken down as a "precaution" after "far-right influencers posted hateful vitriol" seeking to connect him to the shooting.Between the lines: Online sleuths have a long history of misfires, most infamously during the manhunt after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. But what has changed is the speed of misinformation, and the influence of those spreading it.Shaun Maguire, a prominent pro-Trump venture capitalist, claimed Kharbouch was "very likely" the shooter and falsely suggested that the slain MIT professor, Nuno Loureiro, was Jewish and pro-Israel.Laura Loomer, a far-right activist with outsized influence in the Trump administration, continued to claim the shooter was a "Muslim who shouted 'Allahu Akbar'" — even after authorities identified the suspect as Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.Even Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, a senior Justice Department official, amplified claims that Brown's removal of Kharbouch's student pages was suspicious.The other side: Not all crowdsourced attention after the Brown shooting was harmful. Authorities interviewed the author of a Reddit post that flagged a suspicious man and vehicle on Brown's campus, and garnered information that ultimately "blew this case right open," according to Neronha.The big picture: In this era of hyper-partisanship, weakened content moderation and incentivized engagement, the Brown episode fits a familiar and troubling pattern.Earlier this month, the conservative website The Blaze retracted a story that falsely identifed a former law enforcement officer as the Jan. 6 pipe bomber — based on "gait analysis."In the wake of the Bondi Beach terrorist attack in Sydney, social platforms were flooded with misinformation — including AI-generated deepfakes — before authorities clarified who was responsible.For months, podcaster Candace Owens has promoted unsubstantiated allegations that Turning Point USA staff helped cover up Charlie Kirk's assassination, igniting a MAGA civil war.The bottom line: Armchair sleuths thrive in the chaos after mass violence, amplified by platforms that reward speed and outrage. But it's innocent people who are left to absorb the fallout when the claims collapse.