Perhaps you saw the raw footage of the massacre in Las Vegas. Perhaps you saw interviews with survivors and first responders. But stories have popped up on YouTube and other sites claiming that there was no massacre, that no one was killed, that everyone you saw was an actor. It was elaborately staged to persuade the public to support gun control.

The Guardian (U.S.) reports:

“YouTube is promoting conspiracy theory videos claiming that the Las Vegas mass shooting was a hoax, outraging survivors and victims’ families, in the latest case of tech companies spreading offensive propaganda.

“It’s only been days since a gunman inside the Mandalay Bay hotel opened fire on a music festival, killing 58 people and injuring nearly 500. But videos questioning whether the shooting really happened and claiming that the government has lied about basic facts have already garnered millions of views on YouTube and are continuing to run rampant.

“It appears YouTube is actively helping these videos reach wide audiences. Searching for “Las Vegas shooting videos” immediately leads to a wide range of viral videos suggesting that law enforcement and others have purposefully deceived the public. Some label the tragedy a “false flag”, a term conspiracy theorists typically use to refer to mass shootings they say are staged by the government to advance gun control.

“Stephen Melanson, whose wife and daughter were both shot in the attack, told the Guardian he believed YouTube should take down videos suggesting the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history had been faked.

“When I see my wife fighting for her life with a gunshot wound to her chest, and my daughter was also shot, it’s pretty conclusive evidence that it did happen,” said Melanson, whose wife, two daughters and two friends escaped alive from the Route 91 Harvest festival on Sunday night. “My daughter texted me … ‘There is a shooting right in front of us’ and another text said, ‘Mom is shot.’”

Immediately after the shooting, stories popped up on Google, Facebook, and other websites asserting that the shooter was an anti-Trump liberal.

The New York Times reported that Google and Facebook displayed this falsehood prominently:

“When they woke up and glanced at their phones on Monday morning, Americans may have been shocked to learn that the man behind the mass shooting in Las Vegas late on Sunday was an anti-Trump liberal who liked Rachel Maddow and MoveOn.org, that the F.B.I. had already linked him to the Islamic State, and that mainstream news organizations were suppressing that he had recently converted to Islam.

“They were shocking, gruesome revelations. They were also entirely false — and widely spread by Google and Facebook.

“In Google’s case, trolls from 4Chan, a notoriously toxic online message board with a vocal far-right contingent, had spent the night scheming about how to pin the shooting on liberals. One of their discussion threads, in which they wrongly identified the gunman, was picked up by Google’s “top stories” module, and spent hours at the top of the site’s search results for that man’s name.

“In Facebook’s case, an official “safety check” page for the Las Vegas shooting prominently displayed a post from a site called “Alt-Right News.” The post incorrectly identified the shooter and described him as a Trump-hating liberal. In addition, some users saw a story on a “trending topic” page on Facebook for the shooting that was published by Sputnik, a news agency controlled by the Russian government. The story’s headline claimed, incorrectly, that the F.B.I. had linked the shooter with the “Daesh terror group.”

Google, Facebook, and other widely read websites have become co-conspirators with the alt-right. They are protected by the First Amendment even as they spread lies, propaganda, and fake news that undermines trust in not only the free press but in the very idea of fact.

I first became aware of this phenomena after the Sandy Hook Massacre. Like everyone else I knew, I was obsessed with this terrible tragedy. Then someone posted a 30-minute video on my blog claiming that Sandy Hook never happened, that it was an elaborate hoax staged by the Obama administration using professional actors, all to support gun control. I vowed I would never permit that video or any other hate-mongering conspiracy theories on this site. The principal of the Sandy Hook Elementary School was a reader of this blog. Obviously, I never heard from her again. There was no hoax. There was a mass murder of children, teachers, the principal and staff. There are also some very sick people out there who try to profit from tragedy for political reasons. They should be ashamed of themselves. If there is a law against fraud in the public arena, they should be prosecuted.