On my office wall, I have a copy of the nine-point Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook, produced by the US public radio show On the Media. The eighth point says: “Big news brings out the fakers.”
And so it was in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt against Donald Trump on Saturday 13 July. Among the hoaxers was a long-haired young man in glasses, who posted a video on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) in which he pretended to be the 20-year-old from Pennsylvania who had just been named as a suspect by the FBI.
