Several elected officials, including a top political adviser to billionaire Reid Hoffman, have recently suggested without evidence that former President Donald Trump may have orchestrated an attempted assassination of him in July.
Mark Hamill, an actor and Democratic advocate with more than 5 million followers on social platform X, criticized a conservative policy proposal by railing against ideas that were not in the document.
And last month, Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign misleadingly suggested, in posts viewed millions of times, that Trump was confused about his whereabouts during a campaign stop. Her followers seized on the posts to claim that Trump was suffering from cognitive decline.
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For years, the debate over online misinformation has focused on falsehoods circulating on the American right. But in recent weeks, a flood of conspiracy theories and false narratives have also been circulating on the left.
Some misinformation researchers worry that the new wave of left-wing conspiracy theories could further polarize political discourse ahead of the November election. More than a third of President Joe Biden’s supporters believed the assassination attempt was staged, according to a July Morning Consult poll.
“I don’t expect that we’re going to collectively become less conspiratorial,” said Adam Enders, an associate professor of political science at the University of Louisville. “The closer we get to Election Day, the more it’s going to increase.”
The researchers stressed that the lies and exaggerations were not as entrenched or toxic as those that permeate right-wing spaces online. Several studies have shown that the political right is more likely to share false stories and disinformation. Researchers at Northeastern University found that Democrats were generally better than Republicans at distinguishing true from fake news.
This isn’t the first time misinformation has circulated on the left, however. In 2004, for example, a group of disheartened Democrats claimed that President George W. Bush’s reelection over Senator John Kerry was marred by election fraud. Experts quickly refuted the allegations.
Neither Mark Hamill nor the Harris campaign provided comment for this article. Hoffman’s aide apologized for casting doubt on whether the Trump assassination attempt was staged. He parted ways with the billionaire shortly afterward.
The Pennsylvania rally shooting became a lightning rod for conspiracy theories almost as soon as shots were fired. Unfounded rumors that Trump had staged his own shooting festered into enduring conspiracy theories, still shared by anonymous users and liberal influencers with hundreds of thousands of social media followers.
Secret Service agents, some popular influencers on X and Threads have claimed, were in on the plan. The blood from the bullet that hit Trump’s ear was actually ketchup, others theorized. Never mind that there was no evidence to back up these claims.
Mentions of the word “staged” increased on X in the days following the shooting, with more than 300,000 mentions, according to a report from NewsGuard, a company that monitors online disinformation. Many users claimed the shooting was staged, while others criticized the idea as ridiculous. Some left-leaning users who shared conspiracy theories about the attempted assassination saw their follower counts grow, sometimes substantially, NewsGuard found.
Joy Reid, an MSNBC host with more than 340,000 followers on Threads, raised questions about Trump’s injuries from the shooting, doubts that some of her followers interpreted, when his medical records were not released, as a cover-up. Majid M. Padellan, who goes by “Brooklyn Dad Defiant” on X and has more than 1.3 million followers, added to such suspicions by expressing his own doubts about Trump’s injuries. (The FBI later said Trump was hit by a bullet.)
MSNBC did not respond to requests for comment. In an emailed response, Padellan defended his questions about the nature and treatment of Trump’s injury and the actions of the Secret Service that day.
The assassination attempt sparked a similar wave of conspiracy theories from the American right — echoed by prominent Republicans — including that Democrats ordered the attack. As the presidential campaign continued, Harris became the target of a barrage of racist and sexist lies from conservatives, who have also spun lies about Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, her running mate. Trump has personally unleashed a barrage of debunked claims in the past month.
Research has shown that Trump plays a major role in spreading falsehoods on the right, acting as a megaphone that encourages influencers and politicians to spread falsehoods in tandem with each other. Left-wing misinformation, on the other hand, tends to spread more loosely and organically among a diverse set of users and organizations, researchers have found.
“There’s just a world of difference between what you hear from the left occasionally and the systematic production of some pretty disgusting and dangerous things that we’ve been seeing for years now from that right-wing ecosystem,” said Steven Livingston, the founder of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University.
Researchers believe the whiplash of the current campaign season has helped create the ideal conditions for voters of all political persuasions to feel distrustful and bewildered. Conspiracy theories tend to emerge in moments of distress and unrest, research shows.
“When you’re given information and you don’t really know what to do with it, you fill in the blanks in the story yourself,” said Whitney Phillips, assistant professor of media ethics and digital platforms at the University of Oregon.
Social media has become a major source of news for many Americans, allowing voters to retreat into their own ideological silos, valuing virality — and exaggeration — over nuance. Fact-checkers and their colleagues, meanwhile, are scrambling to combat misinformation and rally support.
Those circumstances have paved the way for even outlandish claims to gain national attention. A vulgar, untrue joke about Sen. J.D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, spread quickly after he was added to the ticket, with nearly 400,000 mentions and 4.6 million interactions from July 15-31, according to online and social media data analyzed by Hootsuite. The joke became fodder for late-night TV hosts and even the Harris campaign, which alluded to it on social media and at a rally.
Articles debunking left-wing misinformation have drawn backlash online from critics and journalism watchdogs, who argue that the traditional fact-checking process is ill-suited to tackling left-wing lies. The Associated Press was roundly ridiculed online for attempting to debunk the hoax by writing an understated fact-check that was quickly taken down. The news agency said the fact-check had not gone through “standard editing.”
“Since most of what Democrats say is demonstrably — or at least arguably — true, fact-checkers have resorted to hairsplitting at best and worst,” wrote Dan Froomkin, the founder of Press Watch, a nonprofit that covers political journalism.
Snopes, the fact-checking website, is used to facing backlash for its frequent debunking of right-wing disinformation. But since the war between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip began — and during this year’s presidential election — the website has also come under fire for publishing fact-checking articles about left-wing lies, according to Doreen Marchionni, the site’s executive editor and editor in chief.
“We get criticism from all sides when our reporting doesn’t align with certain left-wing or right-wing positions,” she said.
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