As reports emerged that a man named Ryan Lanza was the shooter in the Newtown, Conn., elementary school mass shooting, a number of Twitter accounts under that name received hateful tweets.
At least one has tweeted that it does not belong to the person, now identified as Adam Lanza, behind the attack that left at least 27 people, including 18 children, reported dead along with the gunman.
Within 20 minutes of that tweet being posted, it had been retweeted more than 8,100 times. It should be noted that it’s difficult to determine the identity of the person behind any given Twitter account, but the speed at which this tweet spread indicates just how important it is to confirm who’s behind social network accounts that appear to belong to the people involved in such tragedies.
A little later, the person running that same account wrote “haha i didnt kill anyone, stop spamming my twitter please. and all my other tweets were just jokes because i only had around 20 followers.”
Tweets he referred to included one reading “i would actually love if the world ended in 2 weeks.. #fucklife,” posted two weeks before today’s incident.
Photo via @ryan__lanza/Twitter