A retired banker has revealed his horror at being wrongly identified online as Charlie Kirk’s assassin — even though he was actually home around 2,000 miles away in Canada.
Michael Mallinson, 77, told the New York Times that he got a frantic phone call from his daughter on Wednesday alerting him to thousands of social media posts identifying him as the sniper who murdered the conservative influencer as he spoke at Utah Valley University.
The bogus news appears to have started on a bogus news site, which likened Mallinson to a man seen being detained at the scene — someone who was himself soon declared not a suspect.
“I’m just shocked by it,” Mallinson said from his home in Toronto.
“How quickly it can happen, how one’s name and photo can get spread around quite quickly.”
The bad info appears to have stemmed from a post from a fake X account — quickly getting shared as people rushed to ID the killer, the Times noted.
As well as being falsely identified, Mallinson was called a “far left extremist” and even “pure evil,” he said. One post claiming he was a registered Democrat was viewed more than 3 million times amid the rampant speculation.
Mallinson said he began receiving direct messages on Facebook berating him as a “savage,” among other things, as the social media posts spread like wildfire.
The retired banker contacted his local police and took painstaking steps to try to wipe his internet footprint from social media, which he said was problematic because his work as an arthritis patient advocate involves him working online.
He said he is considering taking legal action against those who spread the bogus rumor.
“I would expect, because the news cycle moves so quickly, that it will blow over soon,” Mallinson told the Times. “But there’s always a chance that some idiots somewhere will get hold of this information a few months from now and start making noise about it.”
The man he was mistaken for was released soon after he was detained at the scene of Kirk’s shooting. A second person of interest was also released, with the real killer still at large early Thursday afternoon.
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