A SHOOTING IN Sydney, Australia on Sunday left 15 people dead.

Two men – a father and son – opened fire as more than a thousand people gathered to mark the first day of Hanukkah at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on Sunday evening. A child was among the 15 people who were killed.

In the hours that followed, false claims were widely shared online about the suspects, a man who heroically intervened to stop the shooting, as well as numerous conspiracy theories.

The incident showed glaring flaws in an Artificial Intelligence chatbot on the social media platform X, where attempts to correct misinformation proved inadequate to stop its spread.

The shooters

Many of the false claims that spread in the aftermath of the shooting involved the identities of those involved, including the shooters.

Online, social media users said without evidence that the shooters had been sent from Iran, or had been traumatised fighting in Gaza for the Israeli Defence Forces, or that they were agents with the Israeli national intelligence agency Mossad.

One post on X, by an Irish user, claiming that the event was a “false flag” has been viewed on X more than 1,800,000 times to date. A “false flag” operation describes a crime committed to frame an enemy.

Further posts by the account double down on this accusation, saying that reports of Islamic State flags found in the vehicle of the shooters were just “more false flag evidence”.

“ISIS is now and has always been Mossad,” the user wrote, shortly before saying that he lost sympathy for the victims of the shooting when he ‘found out’ what group was behind the Hanukkah event. “I have absolutely zero tears about it,” he wrote as part of an abusive post against the victims.

“But I still believe it to be a clear false flag, and I still believe that the whole event is playing deeply into the hands of the enemy.”

The suspects are Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram, a 50-year-old and 24-year-old father and son. The father was killed in the incident, while the son is stable in hospital. Police are not looking for other suspects.

However, even with these names released, confusion over their identities was still evident on online posts, prompting an appeal by Naveed Akram, a man living in Australia who had no connection to the incident who shared a name with one of the attackers.

He asked social media users to stop using his photos in their posts about the shooting.

Posts on X, viewed millions of times, claimed that data from Google indicated that the event had been widely known about before it even happened, indicating it had been staged. “One of the Bondi shooters name searches spiked on Israeli and Australian Google searches HOURS before the shooting on Bondi Beach,” one post read, along with graphs of supposed searches.

The posts appear to simply misunderstand how time zones work, confusing the time in Australia with their own local time, and therefore getting the order of events confused: the spikes happened after the event, not before.

A hero

Different claims about the identity of a “hero” who intervened also spread online after footage showed a man wrestle a gun off one of the shooters.

The man was identified by government leaders as 43-year-old Ahmed al Ahmed, a fruit seller, originally from Syria.

But that identification came after commentators shared their own incorrect impressions of what had happened.

“A young man from the Jewish community emerged as a hero during the Sydney Hanukkah party massacre”, one post on X viewed more than 1,900,000 times read.

The same claim that the man who intervened was Jewish also shared by Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu, though he later described the same man as a Muslim.

There was also what appears to be an intentional campaign, using a fake news website called The Daily, to name the “hero” who took the gun off a shooter as “Edward Crabtree”, a white Australian.

“The man who killed the terrorist: his name is not Ahmed, his name is Edward Crabtree,” reads one post on X that has been viewed more than 122.5 million times.

“So don’t be fooled by any Jihadi, there is no such thing as a good Muslim or a bad Muslim, they are just Muslims.”

When scheduled Christmas fireworks went off in a Sydney suburb after the attacks, false claims also spread online that these had been set off by Muslims celebrating the killings.

Bad Intelligence

However, the spread of misinformation about the shooting on X was reinforced rather than corrected by a lack of reliable information from Grok, the AI chatbot that X’s founder Elon Musk has pumped many billions of dollars into developing.

Musk has promoted Grok as a “maximally truth-seeking AI”, however the list of controversies associated with the bot has only grown since X was forced to take down the AI’s racist posts after it had branded itself MechaHitler.

After the Sydney shooting, the AI falsely identified images from the scene as a viral video of someone climbing a tree, or showing an injured hostage taken by Hamas on October 7.

A question posed to Grok about whether the name of the “hero” who intervened was Ahmed or Crabtree elicited a strange response about gunshot wounds to Palestinian civilians before concluding: “I couldn’t locate this exact image in sources, so its authenticity remains uncertain.”

However, although the bot spoke about Israel when asked about a shooting in Australia, it also brought up the shooting in Australia when asked about unrelated bond ratings.

“How bad is this?” one X user asked about the American tech company Oracle’s attempts to issue new bonds — a story that has absolutely no connection with the Bondi Beach attack.

“Casualties: At least 11 killed, 29 injured,” Grok answered, before giving a detailed description of the shooting and its fallout.

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