What to do when you're looking for information after a violent event?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Kimberly Adams. items.

FBI officials are still looking into what motivated the 20-year-old gunman who attempted to assassinate

former President Donald Trump last Saturday.

As of this episode, investigators have yet to publicly share any conclusions about his reasons for the attack that killed one rally attendee and

injured the former president and two others. A lack of information didn't stop a flood of online misinformation about why the shooting happened.

Molly Dwyer is a director of Insights at Peak Metrics, a data firm specializing in online narrative threats.

She's been following what kinds of misinformation

have emerged in the aftermath of the shooting.

When we go to look at the actual buckets

of the conspiracy theories, we see everything from the claim that it was a false flag operation

orchestrated by President Trump to, you know, boost his success in the election to the opposite end of that, that it was a targeting by the deep state to stop

President Trump in this election. On the other side of that you had claims that this was Antifa and a false name and photo circulating around claiming that this was an Antifa shooter.

You also had claims even that the Chinese were responsible for it before they had identified a photo of the shooter as a

as a white male. Even further within the conspiracy theories I would say the

latest thing that we're seeing really gain traction online is folks trying to make sense of

how the secret service could have really failed in this job so monumentally

to have allowed this to happen. I think people are naturally looking for an explanation,

so thinking that it might have been an inside job

because they can see law enforcement sort of watching this play

out in real time in the videos that circulated online.

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