As students and staff at Florida State University were locked down and hiding during a deadly shooting, thousands of family members and friends took to social media to piece together what was happening. The flood of information led to numerous rumors circulating, some of which turned out to be false.
Sage Toussaint, a junior at FSU, found herself among those locked inside a room after an active shooter alert sent the campus into lockdown.
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“It’s been hard,” she said. “I still don’t fully know if I know everything,”
Toussaint said she was in the FSU student union and ran to a nearby gym locker room. She said she sat there with others texting her family with updates on her safety and trying to piece together what was happening outside.
“A lot of rumors were going around that there were two shooters, maybe even three, and 30 injured,” she said. “There was a bunch of back-and-forth information, so I had no idea what was true.”
The panic lasted for hours, despite the suspected shooter being taken into custody just minutes after opening fire.
Photos circulated online, some mistakenly believed to show the shooter, but they were actually from an unrelated incident in another state. With so much available on the internet, many were left to navigate the crisis on their own.
News4Jax Crime and Safety Analyst Tom Hackney, a 30 year veteran with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, weighed in on the situation. He emphasized that while social media can be a valuable tool for sharing information, it can also complicate matters.
“Be careful; take it with a grain of salt,” Hackney advised. “Only put out information that you know to be true. The things that you’ve witnessed, and only share that within your circle. Your effort should be to keep yourself safe, keep those in your immediate area safe, notify your family and friends, and just kind of sit back and wait for authorities to do what they need to do.”
Hackney noted that in chaotic situations like this one, investigators have a lot of work to do to determine what witnesses actually saw. The layout of the campus, with its large buildings, can cause the sound of gunfire to echo, leading people to believe shots were fired from different locations or that there were multiple shooters.
However, in the social media era, the abundance of cellphone footage can provide valuable evidence. Hackney explained that the FBI quickly established a link for people to share videos related to the incident. “They just have to take the time to filter through footage to determine what’s real and what could have been altered as they continue to piece together this investigation,” he said.
As the FSU community continues to process the events of that day, the importance of accurate information and clear communication remains paramount.
