Who Is Geary Danley? 4Chan Falsely Identifies Las Vegas Shooting Suspect

Users on the popular and controversial internet message board 4chan misidentified the gunman who carried out the mass shooting that took place in Las Vegas Sunday night, and the false information was elevated by Google search results.

The amateur investigators who frequent 4chan’s /pol (short for “politically incorrect”) discussion board identified a man named Geary Danley as the shooter—a claim that was incorrect and based on primarily on political motivations rather than factual information.

The search for Danley began after the Las Vegas police identified a woman named Marilou Danley as a person of interest and possible traveling companion of the real shooter, though law enforcement later noted they did not believe she was involved with the shooting.

4chan’s users quickly turned their attention to Geary Danley—the apparent the husband of Marilou, according to an archived version of a Facebook page belonging to a user named Geary Danley—though the name was not directly mentioned by law enforcement.

However, 4chan users on /pol—a forum known for its distaste of politically correct culture often attributed to liberalism—quickly picked up on the interests of Geary Danley as indicated by his Facebook like, many of which identified him as a liberal. His liked pages reportedly included Rachel Maddow, MoveOn.org, and a group called the Anti-Trump Army.

Danley was also identified as a registered Democrat by 4chan users, who quickly began piecing together a profile of the man they believed to be the shooter. A profile of Danley put together on Everipedia, a Wikipedia-style site with much looser guidelines and moderation. The post quickly racked up nearly 100,000 page views.

Google also helped circulate the false information surfaced by 4chan. A search for “Gear Danley” displayed a direct link to 4chan in the search engine’s “Top Stories” section—the carousel of stories that often appear near the top of the page to help surface information relevant to trending topics and breaking news.

The search results below the top stories did little to help clarify the situation. Many of the links on the first page of results included news sites that cited 4chan’s “research” as potential evidence about Danley being the shooter and YouTube videos and other message boards around the web discussing him.

A link to Danley’s Facebook page also made it to the front page but no sources debunking the unfounded allegations levied against him appeared in the first results, nor did any of the sources correctly identifying the shooter as Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old retired accountant.

“Unfortunately, early this morning we were briefly surfacing an inaccurate 4chan website in our Search results for a small number of queries,” a spokesperson for Google said in a statement. “Within hours, the 4chan story was algorithmically replaced by relevant results. This should not have appeared for any queries, and we’ll continue to make algorithmic improvements to prevent this from happening in the future.”

The incident is not the first time Google has been accused of helping to surface false information. Last year, the search giant came under fire for surfacing Holocaust denial sites when users would search for information about the genocide.