15 year old harassed after Dayton shooting mistaken identity
A boy who had been misidentified as the Dayton shooter on social media has reportedly faced online harassment, according to his father.
Connor Betts, a 15 year old teenager from Ohio, was absolutely not the shooter in the Dayton mass shooting that claimed the lives of nine victims. The shooter was in fact Connor Betts, a 24 year old Ohio native who was shot and killed by police during the attack.
But that didn’t stop the 15 year old Connor from receiving sustained abuse online after social media users took his photo and used them in a variety of Internet memes.
It started only hours after the shots rang out in Dayton, Ohio. Users rushed to find the social media accounts belonging to the shooter, and one such user stumbled across the account of Connor Betts, a teenager from Ohio who had nothing whatsoever to do with the shooting.
Noting that Betts wore glasses and looked vaguely similar to the shooters at the Gilroy Festival and the El Paso shooting only hours earlier, the user penned a jokey tweet that read “As a nation we need to adress[sic] the violence of radicalized people with glasses”. In the tweet, the user published side by side photos of the Gilroy shooter, the El Paso shooter, and 15 year old Connor Betts, who was not the Dayton shooter.
And from there, Betts’ photo went viral.
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To make matters worse, his photo was subsequently picked up by conspiracy theorists who spent their time on social media claiming all three shooters were – in fact – the same person; a crisis actor employed by the government to play the role of an active shooter.
After realising that his photo was being used, Betts wrote on Twitter “For those accusing me of the shooting in Dayton, all we share is a name. I’m 15 and would never commit such an act of horror,” But the abuse continued.
“They assumed because he had the same name and supported President Donald Trump than he must be the shooter” Betts’ father told the Sandusky Register. “It’s scary how to quickly people jump to the conclusion.” His father also discussed how he feared for his son’s safety as the abuse intensified.
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Betts was also told to stop retweeting President Trump and to set his account to private by a blue-ticked Twitter account belonging to the former editor of the Global Voices blog Jay Ayoub who has nearly 17,000 Twitter followers.
“Change your handle, put it on private and maybe don’t spend your time retweeting white nationalists” Ayoub’s tweet read.
It’s another demonstration of how powerful and potentially dangerous social media bandwagons and misinformation can be for innocent victims who unwittingly find themselves caught in the crosshairs in the moments following shootings and terror attacks. We’ve previously discussed how similar events followed the hours after the Boston Marathon bombings.
It’s also another reminder of why it is so important to be responsible with the information we choose to share on the Internet.
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