The platform is embracing its ‘free speech’ stance, even when that means promoting conspiracies.

Conspiracy theories about the shooting at a rally for Donald Trump began surfacing on X shortly after the news broke this afternoon, with the platform promoting topics including “#falseflag” and “staged” to users. X owner Elon Musk has staunchly advocated for “free speech” on social media platforms — which can include misinformation like the above.

After the shooting, Musk posted that he would “fully endorse” the former president. Bloomberg reported yesterday that Musk donated to a super PAC supporting Trump, giving a “sizable amount” to reelection efforts. Musk has taken on increasingly conservative views in recent years, promoting the “great replacement” conspiracy theory and endorsing support for white pride. His support adds to a growing rank of powerful voices in Silicon Valley that are promoting his campaign.

Other major platforms largely seemed to avoid promoting misinformation

On X, neither trending topic about the shooting is flush with particularly robust or coherent conspiracies; clicking through, you’ll largely find short posts from X users saying that the shooting looks fake or is a stunt. (There is no evidence of either.) But by placing the subjects into X’s trending topics area, the conspiracies are elevated to more people.

Other major social media platforms seemed to be handling the situation better in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. YouTube surfaced news clips and largely directed search results toward news reports and verified creators. Facebook’s search results primarily pointed to news outlets; the platform removed its trending topics section in 2018 over constant complaints about its curation. Threads occasionally displayed conspiracy-related posts atop its trending topic for the incident, but they didn’t appear to surface consistently.

X did not return a request for comment. An email to its press team returned an automatic reply saying, “Busy now, please check back later.”

The company seems to be embracing its role as a center of discussion, though — accurate or otherwise. Even as conspiracy subjects continued to trend, X’s official account posted a short note this evening saying simply, “global town square.”

Conspiracy theories, false claims and unsupported assertions exploded online Saturday after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

Wild theories about the attack, ranging from speculation about who the shooter was to claims about whether or not incident was planned, quickly accumulated millions of views on social media.

With few details about what actually occurred, conspiracy theorists, political operators and social media opportunists took advantage of the open field, pushing out unverified or unsupported claims onto tech platforms that have largely stepped back from moderating posts about major political breaking news events.

On X, conspiracy theories and false information about the incidents gained traction just minutes after the incident occurred.

As video of the incident ripped across the platform, quickly accumulating millions of views, the word “staged” became the second-highest trending topic immediately after “Trump,” with over 228,000 posts on the platform using the word. In just an hour, numerous posts on X claiming the apparent shooting was staged were viewed several millions of times. There is no evidence to support any claims that the shooting was staged — Trump was visibly injured, and a spectator was killed, while another was injured.

Posts on Meta’s Instagram and Threads echoed the sentiment, but to much smaller audiences.

“Antifa” also became a top trending topic on X after social media posts seemingly misidentified the gunman responsible for Saturday’s shooting.

The posts blamed a “prominent Antifa activist,” Mark Violets. Law enforcement had not publicly identified the shooter or released any information about his background as of Saturday evening.

After shootings that make national headlines — whether for jokes, to fool news media or to game the algorithm for engagement and followers — anonymous social media accounts often fill the vacuum of information with posts that misidentify the culprits.