Texas shooting: Google spread misinformation, conspiracy theories

As authorities named Devin Patrick Kelley as the shooter in a horrifying massacre in Sutherland Springs, Texas, which resulted in at least 26 deaths on Sunday, Google once again served up misinformation and posts from conspiracy theorists at the top of search results for his name, as Gizmodo was perhaps the first to point out.

On Sunday evening, Googling ''Devin Patrick Kelley'' delivered results from Paul Joseph Watson, the far-right personality behind InfoWars-affiliated conspiracy website Prison Planet, and far-right Twitter account Stock Monster USA.

The Stock Monster tweet that surfaced read, 'Sutherland Springs, Texas Killer Devin Patrick Kelley is being said to be a Radical Alt-Left Antifa member. - Lots of Facebook posts," with images of the shooter and a rifle attached, but without links to any sources.

Antifa is an umbrella term for loosely organized groups of anti-fascist activists across the country which has a bogeyman in the conservative media.

Since the shooting occurred, publications including CBS and The Daily Beast have more or less disproven the false information regarding the perpetrator's motives and military history.

The posts arrived in the form of Google's ''Popular on Twitter'' module, which appears directly below ''Top stories'' at the top of search results.

As noted by NYC Media Lab executive director Justin Hendrix on Twitter, other dubious information pulled into the Twitter module included that Kelley was a member of a ''Pro Bernie Sanders Group,'' a ''#MUSLIM Convert,'' ''a radical Alt-left, with potential ties to ANTIFA,'' or named ''Samir Al-Hajeeda.''

According to the Daily Beast, the real Kelley was a former US Air Force member who Defence Department records show was sentenced to a ''bad conduct discharge, 12 months confinement, and two reductions in rank to basic airman'' after he was court-martialled in 2012.

Screenshots of his Facebook obtained by the Beast included a photo of a semi-automatic scoped rifle with the caption ''She's a bad bitch'', but not anti-fascist symbols. As per CBS, officials were unclear as to Kelley's motive as of Sunday evening, but said he ''doesn't appear to be linked to any organised terrorist groups''.

The spread of unverified or deliberately falsified information from gutter-level sources in the wake of crises, aided by venues like Google and Twitter, has become a real problem with real consequences, says Gizmodo. In the hours after the shooting, Texas Rep Vicente Gonzalez fell for a reoccurring far-right social media meme claiming comedian Sam Hyde was responsible for the shootings and repeated that information during a live CNN broadcast.

The Twitter module is designed to give users a view of the social media conversation surrounding a trending event, but as this incident makes clear, deliberately inflammatory posts that play to readers' prejudices are often the ones scooped up.

After another massacre in Las Vegas in October, Google's top stories module linked to 4chan's far-right board / pol /, which identified the wrong perpetrator and claimed he was motivated by his opposition to President Donald Trump. Afterwards, Google subsidiary YouTube's search results promoted unfounded theories the killings were a false flag attack.

Google, Twitter, and Facebook have all regularly shifted the blame to algorithms when this happens, but the issue is that the companies write the algorithms, making them responsible for what they churn out. As CNN's Jonathon Morgan noted, those algorithms are often designed to ''show attention-grabbing, influential content to exactly the people most likely to be manipulated by it''.

And as with other stories like the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, uncritical promotion of conspiracy theories by prominent media and political figures plays an additional role in elevating and keeping the misinformation alive long after it originally spread online.\

In a statement on Monday, Google told Gizmodo, ''The search results appearing from Twitter, which surface based on our ranking algorithms, are changing second by second and represent a dynamic conversation that is going on in near real-time. For the queries in question, they are not the first results we show on the page. Instead, they appear after news sources, including our Top Stories carousel which we have been constantly updating. We'll continue to look at ways to improve how we rank tweets that appear in search.''

Additionally, Google's public liaison for search Danny Sullivan told Gizmodo in a phone interview that the company wants to ensure the Twitter module is not pulling misinformation.

But at the end of the day, a handful of tech companies that dominate how Americans and people around the world access information online don't seem to have been particularly active in addressing the problem.