Last Saturday night, Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell was out to dinner

when he started getting messages that something had happened at a Trump rally.

Drew covers Tech, and he opened up X on his phone

to try to figure out what was going on. I saw the first photos that had kind of

the bloody ear but it wasn't really clear exactly what had happened, how severe it was,

and kind of trying to figure it out from just this, you know, fire hose of tweets and ex-posts and clips it was just kind of like

maddening so after a couple minutes I just went to it went to a news site

you actually got all the information I needed but I was just sort you know, everybody was kind of like had their hair on fire from this one instance and it was really hard kind of to figure out what was true and what was just people making it up.

Theories started circulating, maybe even from the moment this happened.

But I wonder, as someone who covers this, when you went online, what stood out to you?

The conspiracy theories were stewing on both sides.

For people who were Trump supporters, they were seeing this, you know, scary incident and questioning, how could this

happen? This must have been an inside job. This must have been a setup. But you also

saw on the other side people who were not Trump supporters were saying,

this is ludicrous. This is all staged. You know, what if he had a ketchup packet in his pocket?

It turns out that the internet, like nature,

abhors a vacuum.

I think about it like a supply and demand issue.

The supply of real information in the first hours after a big news event is so low.

We just don't know what happened, right? I mean, there's journalists on the scene, but even

they don't know what happened.

Into that void. the scene, but even they don't know what happened.

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