Transparency or 'cover-up': Gardaí face Sophie's Choice when tackling fake news online
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THE FIGHT AGAINST misinformation can sometimes be Sophie's Choice.
Police reactions to separate incidents in Carlow and Liverpool over the past week have shown that quashing false rumours can be made so much easier with transparency.
But the ability of bad-faith actors on social media to twist the facts means that providing more information about the perpetrators of attacks on the public mean that more traps may lie in wait in future.
At around 6.15pm on Sunday evening, 22-year-old Evan Fitzgerald
opened fire
at Fairgreen Shopping Centre in Carlow before he inflicted fatal injuries on himself.
It was a shocking, unprecedented incident by the standards of Ireland in 2025 – but also one which saw a bleakly familiar response take shape on social media within minutes of the first reports of a shooting emerging.
Before anyone knew what had happened, there was a surge of misinformation, including claims that:
seven people had been shot
; a 9-year-old girl
had been shot in the leg
; the gunman
was shot dead by gardaí
; he had
an explosive device strapped to his leg
; and that
he was an Islamic terrorist
.
But what happened next was a bit more unorthodox.
The Garda Press Office issued four press releases over the next 24 hours which
provided a full picture of what happened
, including a precise timeline of events, the extent of injuries (including to a young girl), and – most notably – a description of the perpetrator as a 'white adult Irish male' on Sunday night.
It was unusually direct by the standards of the Garda press office, which tends only to offer the most basic details around crimes, in part out of sensitivity towards victims and their families.
The decision followed a similar move by police in Merseyside less than a week previously, after a man drove into a crowd of football fans celebrating Liverpool's Premier League title win in the city.
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The incident in Liverpool saw
the same kind of misinformation spread as in Carlow
, with false claims that the ramming was a terrorist attack and that the suspect was a person of colour being shared on social media.
As happened in the aftermath of the shooting in Carlow, the police moved quickly and said the suspect was a 53-year-old white man from the Liverpool area.
In both instances, the change in tactics appears to derive from almost identical hard lessons from recent history.
The Dublin riots in November 2023 were fuelled by a deluge of speculation about the identity and motive of the man who carried out a knife attack at a school near Parnell Square.
The Southport riots last year in England followed the same grim pattern, when far-right groups seized on speculation about the identity and motive of the man who fatally stabbed three children.
Both instances were preceded by hours of silence from police and officialdom, which created an information vacuum in which speculation and conspiracy theories were able to take hold.
On each occasion, speculation dampened much more quickly after both police forces provided additional information about the background of the perpetrators.
Not only did this have the effect of preventing information contagion around one of the biggest news events of the year, it also made bad actors on social media look like fools for speculating so freely.
The strategy denied bad actors the ability to hijack the narrative and acknowledged a basic truth about modern social media: in the absence of facts, fiction will flourish.
But although it worked this time around, it's a tricky strategy that's not without its downsides.
Several far-right accounts online accused Gardaí and Merseyside Police of being 'too quick' to say that the suspects in Carlow and Liverpool were white locals, with the implication that this was an act of political messaging rather than public clarity.
The next time a similar major incident occurs and Gardaí or British police don't — or can't — release identifying information about the suspect(s), it's easy to see how the decision not to do so will be seized upon.
The public may take the lack of information as confirmation that the suspect is foreign or non-white, and may end up believing bad actors or others who are speculating about what has happened.
Related Reads
Man who fired shots in Carlow shopping centre named locally as 22-year-old Evan Fitzgerald
Former head of Counter Terrorism for the UK, Neil Basu
told the News Agents podcast
that transparency is needed for police to respond in the age of social media.
'The best position policing can come to is a standard position where they give the maximum amount of information they can,' he said.
'I think what was more important in Southport was the allegations of cover-up, as though people were trying to suppress something.'
This is exactly what played out in Carlow before gardaí issued their series of statements: people online suggested that the gunman's body was being covered for nefarious reasons, rather than the operational issues that are usually present in such cases.
At its core, the issue is more of a problem with online platforms than with the police.
Gardaí and police in the UK are simply reacting to the situation created by social media companies, who allow false claims to spread unchecked in the moments after a crisis.
Large social media platforms, not police, are ultimately responsible for hosting unreliable accounts that can present themselves as media outlets or pay for verification on a platform like X, which enables them to appear more credible than they are.
It is easy to see how misinformation takes hold when paid-for but unreliable accounts frame speculation and misinformation through the language of legitimate journalists, claiming they have received 'tips', 'unconfirmed reports' or information from 'sources'.
It's a process that works for both bad-faith actors and social media companies themselves: they get the engagement through outrage and amplification, but if they're wrong, they can simply say they were 'just sharing' what they heard.
As real events become overlaid with imaginary details, the truth has to play a constant game of catch-up.
For police and state bodies, the problem is a difficult choice: leave the void that bad actors will inevitably fill, or provide information early and risk politicising every statement.
That choice will continue until social media platforms are forced to reckon with the role they play — and until meaningful disincentives exist for those who weaponise misinformation.
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