Five years ago, on May 25, 2020, a white US police officer killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, while arrested.
On the sidelines video showed Derek Chauvin, who kneeled Floyd’s neck for about nine minutes in Minneapolis, Minnesota, pleaded that Floyd could not breathe. The footage sparked weeks of global protests against police brutality and racism. It contributed to the Ju Court’s murder conviction against Chaubin and the federal investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department.
There was ample evidence that Chaubin and the police misconduct was to blame Floyd’s death, but another story soon emerged – Floyd died from a drug overdose.
Five years later, the falsehood is central to President Donald Trump calling for forgiveness of Chaubin.
For example, Marjorie Taylor Green, a Trump Republican member from Georgia, recently revived her long, broken take on which Chauvin didn’t cause Floyd’s death.
“I strongly support Derek Chaubin being merciless and released from prison,” Green wrote in the May 14th X-Post. “George Floyd passed away from a drug overdose.”
In 2021, Minnesota ju judges found Chaubin guilty of second-degree intentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Chaubin also pleaded guilty to two violations of federal criminal civil rights laws. He violated once against Floyd and once against a 14-year-old in 2017. State and federal rulings that Chaubin has been in the last 20 years each.
In 2023, after Floyd’s death sparked a two-year investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice discovered that the city of Minneapolis and its police department were engaged in patterns of civil rights violations, including excessive use of force against black and Native Americans and illegal discrimination.
The story of Floyd’s death from an overdose lasted through criminal trials of the police officers involved and beyond their convictions. It was one of many false statements about Floyd’s actions, his criminal history and the protests that followed his murder.
Experts said systemic racism also contributes to the surge in inaccurate narratives and its persistence.
“The emergent core-through line is a long-standing, deep racist story about black crime, and Rachel Cuo, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison University who studies race, social movements and technology, spoke of the falsehood.
The summer 2020 protests are based on protests in 2014 and 2016 against police brutality, but the Floyd case was the catalyst, and racial justice advocates have attracted global visibility and corporate attention, Kuo said.
The view was priced.
Once people of color achieve visibility into their social movements and political demands, efforts to outlaw those demands will soon follow, Kuo said. Misinformation plays a role in trying to “chip” the belief that what happened to Floyd is unfair or undermines the protests overall, she said.
How conservative influencers distort autopsy reports to promote overdose claims
Chaubin kills Floyd after police are called to a grocery store in the corner where Floyd is suspected of using a $20 bill. News reports on Floyd’s criminal history, including three drug claims, two theft cases, robbery and trespassing, prompted false claims about his career.
One commissioned by Hennepin County Medical Examiner and Floyd’s family, two autopsy reports concluded that Floyd’s death was a murder – a report commissioned by Floyd’s family. They pointed out different causes of death, but both reports said he died from an overdose.
Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office reported “fentanyl addiction” and “recent use of methamphetamine” in “other important conditions” related to his death, but did not say that the drugs killed him. “He had undergone cardiopulmonary arrests while being held by law enforcement officers,” Floyd said. A private autopsy concluded that Floyd had died of choking.
Nevertheless, details of fentanyl in the Hennepin County Autopsy Report provided a kindling to spark a story of drug overdose. Politifact first fact-checked the story when it was published on a conservative blog in August 2020.
As Chaubin’s trial approached early 2021, Fox News host Tucker Carlson falsely told millions of viewers that Floyd’s autopsy “showed that he almost certainly died from a drug overdose.”
Conservative influencer Candice Owens amplified the false narrative in March 2021. The lawyer defending Chaubin argued that drug use was a more major cause of death than police control, but the ju judges were not convinced.
Chaubin’s 2021 conviction did not spell out the end of misinformation about Floyd’s death. The narcotics of overdose emerged again in the second half of 2022. This is because the trial of two other police officers who were charged with second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd’s death approached.
Misinformation experts said it’s not surprising that Floyd and the 2020 protests are targeted for false portrayals years later, as widespread attention has spread when online platforms encourage inflammatory commentary.
“Alienated groups have been the main targets of misinformation for hundreds of years or even thousands of years,” says Dean Freon, a school of communications professor at Annenburg University at the University of Pennsylvania, studying digital politics with an emphasis on the dimensions of race, gender and other identity, as falsehood can demonize, harm, and create weapons to further suppress and discriminate.
He said Floyd’s murder was a magnet of misinformation, as well as events such as the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting and the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as events such as the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting and the COVID-19 pandemic, and he was a magnet of misinformation because it “fits with a prominent event type tied to controversial, long-term political issues.”
Conservative activists and politicians with large followers continue to target Floyd and the 2020 protests.
The drug overdose story grew alongside the October 2022 release of Owens’ film about the Floyd and the Black Life Matter (BLM) movement. Rapper Ye, who was once Kanye West, parroted a false story, citing the Owens film in a podcast interview in October 2022.
In October 2023, Carlson repeated the story of placebo overdose. The X-Video has since received more than 23.5 million views. In December 2023, Green re-shared another Carlson video with the caption, “George Floyd died of drug overdose.”
Ramesh Srinivasan, professor of information research at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Educational and Information Studies, said social media algorithms do not allow subtle conversations that require important details and context for productive discussions about what happened in the summer of 2020.
A person’s online visibility and virality can sometimes be directly correlated with income, and he said it improves when a person takes an extremely, hostile, partisan or hardened position.
“These terms favored certain people who specialize in troll-type content, cheap content, and intentionally pitching false content,” Srinivasan said.
Freeron said the internet has widened the scope of misinformation by saying it “added fuel to the fire.”
“So it’s important to stay vigilant against misinformation,” he said.
Politifact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
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