5 years in the past on Might 25, 2020, a white police officer in the US killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, throughout an arrest.
A bystander’s video confirmed officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for about nine minutes in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as Floyd pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. The footage sparked weeks of world protests towards police brutality and racism. It contributed to a jury’s homicide conviction towards Chauvin and a federal investigation into the Minneapolis Police Division.
Though ample proof confirmed that Chauvin and police misconduct had been guilty for Floyd’s dying, one other narrative shortly emerged – that Floyd died due to a drug overdose.
5 years later, that falsehood is central to requires President Donald Trump to pardon Chauvin.
Consultant Marjorie Taylor Greene, a member of Trump’s Republican Social gathering from Georgia, for instance, just lately revived her longstanding and long-debunked take that Chauvin didn’t trigger Floyd’s dying.
“I strongly help Derek Chauvin being pardoned and launched from jail,” Greene wrote in a Might 14 X submit. “George Floyd died of a drug overdose.”
In 2021, a Minnesota jury convicted Chauvin of second-degree unintentional homicide, third-degree homicide and second-degree manslaughter. Chauvin additionally pleaded responsible to twice violating a federal prison civil rights statute – as soon as towards Floyd and as soon as towards a 14-year-old in 2017. The state and federal sentences that Chauvin is serving concurrently every exceeded 20 years.
In 2023 after a two-year investigation sparked by Floyd’s dying, the US Division of Justice discovered that the town of Minneapolis and its police division engaged in a pattern of civil rights violations, together with use of extreme power and illegal discrimination towards Black and Native American individuals.
The narrative that Floyd died of an overdose endured by means of the concerned law enforcement officials’ prison trials and past their convictions, partly as a result of highly effective political critics of the racial justice motion sought to rewrite historical past with false claims. It was considered one of many false statements about Floyd’s actions, his prison historical past and the protests that followed his murder.
Consultants mentioned systemic racism contributes additionally to the proliferation of the wrong narratives and their endurance.
“The core through-line that emerges is the form of longstanding, deep racist narratives round Black criminality and in addition the methods individuals attempt to justify who’s or isn’t an ‘harmless sufferer’,” Rachel Kuo, a College of Wisconsin-Madison professor who research race, social actions and know-how, mentioned of the falsehoods.
The summer time 2020 protests constructed on 2014 and 2016 protests towards police brutality, however with Floyd’s case as a catalyst, racial justice advocates achieved world visibility and company consideration, Kuo mentioned.
That visibility got here with a value.
When individuals of color obtain visibility for his or her social actions or political calls for, an effort to delegitimise these calls for shortly follows, Kuo mentioned. Misinformation performs an element by attempting to “chip away” on the perception that what occurred to Floyd was unjust or to undermine the protest motion total, she mentioned.
How conservative influencers distort an post-mortem report back to push overdose declare
Chauvin killed Floyd after police had been known as to a nook grocery retailer the place Floyd was suspected of utilizing a counterfeit $20 invoice. Information studies about Floyd’s prison report – which included three drug fees, two theft instances, aggravated theft and trespassing – fuelled false claims about his background.
Two post-mortem studies – one carried out by Hennepin County’s medical expert and one commissioned by Floyd’s household – concluded Floyd’s death was a homicide. Though they pointed to completely different causes of dying, neither report said he died due to an overdose.
The Hennepin County medical expert’s workplace reported “fentanyl intoxication” and “current methamphetamine use” amongst “different vital circumstances” associated to his dying, nevertheless it didn’t say medicine killed him. It mentioned Floyd “skilled a cardiopulmonary arrest whereas being restrained by regulation enforcement officer”. The personal post-mortem concluded Floyd died of suffocation.
However, the Hennepin County post-mortem report’s fentanyl element offered kindling for the drug overdose narrative to catch fireplace. PolitiFact first fact-checked this narrative when it was revealed on a conservative blog in August 2020.
As Chauvin’s trial approached in early 2021, then-Fox Information host Tucker Carlson wrongly informed his hundreds of thousands of viewers that Floyd’s post-mortem confirmed he “virtually definitely died of a drug overdose. Fentanyl.”
Conservative influencer Candace Owens amplified the false narrative in March 2021. Attorneys defending Chauvin argued drug use was a extra primary cause of death than the police restraint, however jurors had been unconvinced.
Chauvin’s 2021 conviction didn’t spell the tip of misinformation about Floyd’s dying. The drug overdose narrative emerged once more in late 2022 because the trial neared for 2 different law enforcement officials charged with aiding and abetting second-degree homicide and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd’s dying.
Misinformation consultants mentioned it’s not stunning that Floyd and the 2020 protests stay a goal of false portrayals years later due to the widespread consideration Floyd’s dying drew at a time when on-line platforms incentivise inflammatory commentary.
“Marginalised teams have been prime targets of misinformation going again lots of, even 1000’s of years” as a result of falsehoods might be weaponised to demonise, hurt and additional oppress and discriminate, mentioned Deen Freelon, a College of Pennsylvania Annenberg College for Communication professor who research digital politics with a concentrate on race, gender, ideology and different id dimensions in social media.
He mentioned Floyd’s homicide was a magnet for mis- and disinformation as a result of it “matches the mould of a outstanding occasion that ties into controversial, long-running political points,” much like occasions such because the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary College mass capturing and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Conservative activists and politicians with giant followings have continued to focus on Floyd and the 2020 protests.
The drug overdose narrative proliferated along side the October 2022 launch of Owens’s movie about Floyd and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) motion, titled The Best Lie Ever Offered: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM. Rapper Ye, previously Kanye West, parroted the false narrative in an October 2022 podcast interview, citing Owens’s movie.
In October 2023, Carlson repeated the false drug overdose narrative. That X video has since acquired greater than 23.5 million views. In December 2023, Greene reshared a distinct Carlson video with the caption, “George Floyd died from a drug overdose.”
Ramesh Srinivasan, an info research professor on the College of California-Los Angeles Graduate College of Schooling and Info Research, mentioned social media algorithms don’t permit for nuanced conversations that require element and context, that are necessary for productive dialogue about what occurred in the summertime of 2020.
An individual’s on-line visibility and virality, which might instantly correlate to their revenues in some instances, improves when an individual takes excessive, antagonistic, partisan or hardened positions, he mentioned.
“These circumstances have propped up sure individuals who specialise within the peddling of troll-type content material, of caricatured content material, of intentionally false content material,” Srinivasan mentioned.
Freelon mentioned the web has “added gas to the hearth” and broadened misinformation’s attain.
“So it’s necessary to stay vigilant towards misinformation,” he mentioned, “not solely as a result of lies are inherently unhealthy but additionally as a result of the individuals who bear the hurt have typically traditionally suffered disproportionately from prejudice and mistreatment.”
PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.