Viral

The worrying thing happening just after the Las Vegas shooting

Picture:
Picture:
YouTube screengrab (10.20am, 4 October 2017)

On Sunday, 59 people were shot and killed at a music festival in Las Vegas.

Depressingly, the conspiracy theorists did not wait long to pounce on the worst mass shooting in modern American history.

YouTube, it seems, remains the focal point for worrying narratives and unfounded accusations.

This time around, you'll stumble across countless videos claiming they have 'proof' of a false flag operation - mostly presented in a low resolution and narrated by an automated text reader.

BuzzFeed News noted that on Tuesday, the third of 2,670,000 results on YouTube for the search term 'Las Vegas shooting' was a video claiming it was a 'false flag' attack.

Picture: YouTube screengrab taken 10.15 on 4/10/17

Using the auto complete function of the search bar, the words, 'Las Vegas' will typically present 'Las Vegas false flag' as an option.

On Wednesday, looking at the page in incognito mode, a video that claiming to 'debunk' the shooting of 59 people, is the 11th result.

Following a pattern set by conspiracies surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the video in question claims to have found evidence of a 'second shooter,' on a lower floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel.

BuzzFeed notes that the position of these videos shifts about every few hours, but they rarely drop off the first page of results.

Not everyone who clicks a link is doing so out of earnest belief, and some curious viewers will likely dismiss the ridiculous claims made in these videos.

It would appear that a growing number of people's reactions to a tragedy such as this, involves opening their bootlegged editing suite and posting extremely distressing videos online - a practice that doesn't appear to be helping the situation.

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