A retired banker living in Toronto found himself unwillingly thrust into the centre of a political firestorm after being falsely linked to the shooting of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk on Wednesday.
Michael Mallinson, 77, had no idea what was happening until he got a panicked phone call around 6 p.m., while he was taking a nap. It was his daughter, instructing him to delete his social media because his name and photo were being spread online by an account claiming he was the suspect in the shooting.
The problem: Mallinson says he’s never set foot in Utah.
“This was all shock and horror, first of all, that there’d been a shooting, but second of all that I was in any way named or implicated in it,” said Mallinson.
Kirk, a right-wing activist and close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump who played an influential role in rallying young Republican voters, was shot around 12:20 p.m. local time in Orem, Utah, in what the state governor called a political assassination, even as a suspect has not been formally identified.
The rumour appears to have begun when an account posing as a Nevada news channel, Fox Reno 11, shared a photo of Mallinson next to one of a suspect being detained by police after Kirk’s shooting.
The person detained appeared to be an older man wearing glasses and a blue shirt, with a haircut similar to one Mallinson had in a photo he posted on an old Twitter account. Mallinson says he thought he had deleted the account after the platform was purchased by Elon Musk.
But the account had posted Mallinson’s photo as a false close-up of a person detained and then later released by police.
The post also named Mallinson as the shooter and claimed he was a registered Democrat in Utah.
The post has since been taken down but other posts sharing the same misinformation have accumulated thousands of views on X.
In a statement sent to CBC Toronto, Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns the Fox channel, said the post should not be attributed to the station and they were working to get it taken down.
Craig Silverman, co-founder of Indicator, a publication focused on digital deception, said at a time when so many online tools are available for sleuthing enthusiasts, it’s easy to be misled by inaccurate information.
In trying to find out more about the suspect, the people spreading the claim about Mallinson were most likely led astray by leads that turned out to be inaccurate.
“They don’t understand how to interpret those results to make sure that they’re not being led down the wrong path,” said Silverman.
In situations like these, Silverman says the best course of action is to wait and not to jump to conclusions before all the details are available.
Mallinson said before he deactivated his social media accounts, he received a variety of messages from people in response to his supposed involvement in the shooting.
“I received some nasty messages on Facebook, but I also heard from people that I don’t know telling me to be warned that my name and face were out there,” said Mallinson. “Nevertheless, it’s quite alarming that misinformation like this can spread so quickly.”
He said his family reached out to the Toronto Police Service to alert them to the situation and they seemed interested in discussing it with him, but he hadn’t had the chance to connect with an officer yet.
“I feel violated,” said Mallinson.
“I’ve got a lot of friends worldwide on Facebook that I communicate with and I had to deactivate my accounts for a while without really even being able to tell them about anything. And now my wife and I are sending out emails to say, ‘Hey, this is my image and name, but it’s not me.'”
