“Craziness at Monroeville Mall!!!”
“Shooting at Monroeville Mall. Too many guns.”
“Active shooter at Monroeville Mall in Allegheny County.”
“Hearing reports that some people were trampled in a stampede.”
These posts and others like them spread across social media the Sunday afternoon before Christmas, when the mall was packed with holiday shoppers.
None of it, it turned out, was true.
Police were called to the mall just before 3 p.m. on Dec. 22. Video from several mall patrons showed multiple officers rushing through the food court with their weapons.
The information was posted online and shared nearly instantaneously with everyone in the world who had an interest in the topic. Social media reports followed that someone had been shot in the face, or had been shot in the mouth.
Monroeville police Chief Doug Cole said his detectives spent much of the Monday after the incident combing through video and audio footage from the mall. They could not find any evidence that anything related to weapons ever happened, nor did anyone show up at area hospitals with any injuries consistent with the reports police received.
“We were getting all kinds of reports of someone shot in the face and other things, and that just did not happen,” Cole said. “We can’t verify that there was ever a gunshot at the mall on Sunday.”
At a time when anyone with a cellphone is potentially in a position to capture breaking news, situations like the one on Dec. 22 can just as easily be helped or harmed by out-of-context social media posts.
Cole said there may have been an argument or an altercation, “and someone made an emergency call with good intentions,” Cole said. “But when people see all the police coming in, it causes them to see or assume things that aren’t necessarily happening. They saw a cop running into the mall with a rifle, and that’s all they know.”
Shoppers described the scene in the mall as chaotic, with several telling media outlets they heard people claiming there was an active shooter inside the mall.
Good intentions
Kenneth Joseph, an associate professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said in the age of social media, well-intentioned users of services like X and TikTok can exacerbate a situation in an attempt to be helpful.
“People want to help, and I think there’s an urgency and a tendency to share unconfirmed information because they think it’s the right thing to do,” Joseph said.
In Buffalo, Joseph said, social media posts during a recent blizzard were a tool that was used in some cases to save lives.
But a social media user tweeting about icy or snowy conditions on a road they’re using is very different from someone extrapolating or making assumptions based on seeing police running through a mall food court with weapons drawn.
Joseph pointed to research by University of Washington professor Kate Starbird on the use of social media during emergencies. Starbird said rumors and misinformation can spread rapidly online after disaster events. Users who see those posts sometimes amplify them and, other times, challenge them or attempt to verify them.
“People have a lot of motivations for putting information like that on social media,” Joseph said. “Part of it is genuine concern and an attempt to help. But there’s also the attention economy.”
Joseph said social media users, particular on fully-public platforms such as X or TikTok, imagine they are simply posting to their followers.
“On Facebook, you might just be sending it to your friends, but on (X) or TikTok, it can go viral,” he said.
To try and get the most accurate information to citizens, Cole said, mall staff operates a text service they utilized regarding the end of the mall lockdown around 4 p.m. The police department also uses the Nixle text alert system, but shoppers and residents must register to receive the texts.
In responding to an initial call, Cole said, police must operate based on the information available.
“People really swear they heard a gunshot,” he said. “I don’t want to call anyone a liar, but it just doesn’t seem to be what happened. The point is, there was no active shooter.”
Cole said he held off on calling in additional resources until first responders could get a better handle on the situation.
“We had a lot of other personnel available to us, and I held back because you want to stop a threat, but you don’t want 40 or 50 cops showing up without a good reason.”