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  • 2017-10-04 (xsd:date)
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  • Did 'Melbourne Antifa' Claim Responsibility for the Vegas Massacre? (en)
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  • Among rumors that quickly spread in the wake of the 1 October 2017 Las Vegas mass murder was one that the Melbourne Antifa (purportedly an Australian affiliate of the decentralized anti-fascism movement) claimed responsibility for the massacre, during which 58 victims were killed and hundreds injured by a man who opened fire on a crowd watching a Jason Aldean performance. The Daily Mail and Puppet String News both carried versions of the rumor, and the former appeared to have taken its story straight from an unverified Facebook page (Melbourne Antifa/@antifamelb) without even obtaining comment from the operators of the page: If either source investigated farther than a solitary Facebook post published by unknown parties on an unverified page, their reporting gave no indication that was the case. The post was quickly deleted, but an archived version of it remains: The Facebook Page Melbourne Antifa (@antifamelb) has just over 800 followers and features divisive rhetoric, but little evidence of its legitimacy. By contrast, the page Melbourne Antifascist Info (@melantifainfo) has more than 3,500 followers and a vastly different profile. On 8 June 2017, @melantifainfo published a post declaring the smaller @antifamelb a phony page, linking to an instance they described as willful ignorance on the part of media sources referencing it: The post remained intact and unedited nearly four months later, and Melbourne blogger Andy Fleming (@slackbastard) pegged the page as fake as early as April 2017. BuzzFeed's Craig Silverman reported on the trend of phony antifa accounts in May 2017. On 2 October 2017, @melantifainfo shared a screenshot of the Daily Mail article about the purported claim of responsibility, once again imploring journalists and readers to remain skeptical: We contacted the Melbourne Antifa page as well as Fleming for further information. The @melantifainfo page provided us with a prepared statement: Fleming shared several posts in which journalists recognized (or failed to note) the @antifamelb page as phony: Multiple credible news reports identified Melbourne Antifa/@antifamelb as a disinformation outfit, but disreputable sources based entire items on a single deleted post to the page with no secondary confirmation. Active and responsive Melbourne Antifa pages, including @melantifainfo and @slackbastard, repeatedly denounced the phony page both prior to and after the massacre in Las Vegas. All available information points to purposeful reliance on poor information, shoddy reporting, or both, and no information has emerged to indicate the shooter was in any way linked to Melbourne Antifa or any other branch of the anti-fascist movement. (en)
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