Right-wing activist Kyle Chapman, known as the "Based Stick Man," started the rumor Saturday morning by tweeting, "A Ben Shapiro supporter was stabbed in the neck by Antifa terrorists last night in Berkeley CA."The Berkeley Police Department flatly denied that such a stabbing took place:
Chapman, a 41-year-old Daly City man who's charged with felony possession of a leaded cane for allegedly brandishing a leaded stick at a rally in Berkeley in March, described the woman's attacker as a "demon scum leftist" and asked people to "please pray 4her."
Online accounts surrounding a stabbing at last night's protest are false.
— Berkeley Police (@berkeleypolice) September 15, 2017
In our current media environment, a claim like this can get posted and magnified by rightwing media and a potentiall fast number of retweets.
Stories are more persuasive than statistics. So statistics showing that the vast number of incidents of political terrorist violence in the US has come from rightwingers in recent decades don't have the same kind of emotional appeal as "leftwing anarchist in Berkeley stabs peaceful protester in the neck."
There's no magic solution to disinformation campaigns based on claims like this. But people who don't want to get suckered by disinformation will need to pay attention to the factual basis, or lack thereof, in such claims. Especially ones that start taking off as mass memes. That's why fact-checking sites like Snopes, TruthorFiction, and Politifact provide such important journalistic service in today's media landscape.
A September 13 item at TruthorFiction features another claim from a guy named Joshua Witt claimed that someone had stabbed him for looking like a neo-Nazi. Tom McGee reports on the case in He claimed he was stabbed for looking like a “neo-Nazi.” Now police say he bought the knife himself. Denver Post 08/28/2017:
Witt’s report followed blanket news coverage of a white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, Va., that turned violent. One woman who was protesting the Unite the Right demonstration was killed when a white supremacist drove into the crowd.Maybe claiming they've been stabbed by Mean Libruls is some kind of alt-right fad right now!
Police became skeptical of Witt’s story when they reviewed surveillance video and saw no one running from the scene. They also found a transient who lives in the area who matched the description Witt gave, but cleared him as a suspect.
Video from a nearby sporting goods store showed Witt purchasing a small knife.
When police confronted Witt with that information on Aug. 24, he admitted accidentally cutting himself with the knife while in his car parked in front of the store.
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