Fake news isn’t just a headline problem — it’s a cultural crisis. A tattooed Justin Bieber lookalike crashed a DJ set in Las Vegas and convinced Gryffin, the headliner, to bring him onstage. Minutes later, security exposed the imposter and banned him from the hotel. In a city that celebrates illusion, the stunt might seem like harmless fun.

But not all impersonations are created equal. This prank highlights a darker truth: once someone can convincingly pose as another person, the line between joke and danger blurs. If one man can fool a Vegas DJ, what happens when bad actors impersonate school shooters? That’s where the hoaxes turn deadly serious.

From school shooting hoaxes that terrify families, to Trump’s manufactured outrage campaigns, to AI bots creating deadly illusions, disinformation has become a defining feature of public life. This section unpacks some of the biggest examples from the past two weeks, showing how fake news is weaponized to scare, outrage, and mislead — and why the consequences are anything but harmless.

School Shooting Hoaxes: Generation Lockdown’s New Nightmare

The new school year began with panic. Students across the country received texts from their schools: “run, hide, fight.” Active shooter alerts poured in from Arkansas, Arizona, Iowa State, Kansas State, Colorado University, and the University of New Hampshire — all in one day. In the days that followed, calls hit campuses in Georgia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Florida, and California.

There was just one problem: none of the shootings happened. They were pranks or hoaxes. Fake news that caused a real panic.

This isn’t a one-off—it’s been happening for years. A Reddit forum last year overflowed with stories of false shooter threats that triggered lockdowns. Back in 2022, California news outlets were sounding the alarm over a surge in false school shooting reports. In 2023, Homeland security expert Juliette Kayyem called these hoaxes a “second curse” of the school shooting era. The trauma is real: kids grow up wondering if each alarm is life-or-death. They’re Generation Lockdown, raised in fear.

These hoaxes drain police resources, fuel paranoia, and deepen the mental health crisis in schools. Worse, they normalize chaos, making it harder to distinguish a prank from a real emergency. And that’s exactly the blurred reality fake news thrives in.

Fake Flags: How Trump Manufactures Outrage

On August 25, Trump signed an executive order to prosecute flag burning, despite a 1989 Supreme Court ruling protecting it. The order came at a strange time, with no signs of a flag-burning epidemic. Ironically, it sparked one: a military veteran burned a flag outside the White House in response. But facts don’t matter here. The goal wasn’t protecting flags—it was stoking conservative outrage.

“This tactic isn’t new. Conservatives have long whipped up anger over trivialities: Cracker Barrel logos, LGBTQIA+ issues, critical race theory content in schools, or the fear of communism. Fox News host Jesse Watters admitted the game openly, saying networks keep viewers hooked with culture-war gimmicks: “You just have to keep your audience happy with what they’re used to… that’s why people will be watching Fox until they die.”

The recycling of fake outrages goes back decades. Today, Trump leans on the same playbook, using a favorite topic for conservative fear-mongering: crime.” Trump claims that crime in Washington, D.C., is ‘getting worse.’ In reality, it isn’t. Violent crime has actually dropped to a 30 year low. When fact-checked, Trump accused officials of fabricating the statistics and even ordered Department of Justice investigations into whether the numbers were ‘manipulated.’ Yet when those same officials showed that crime had fallen after Trump sent the National Guard to D.C., he embraced the new numbers—produced by the very same offices he had previously accused of lying. Orwell couldn’t have written this.

But he didn’t stop there. Trump falsely claimed that the National Guard’s presence had given D.C. its first 11-day streak without a murder in ‘many years’—even though that streak actually occurred in February 2025. He also insisted there was ‘no crime’ despite hundreds of offenses being reported. Trump also falsely claimed that D.C. was at an “all-time high” in crime at the end of President Biden’s administration, even though crime was far higher in the 1990s.

To make Trump’s lies more convincing, many people in D.C. have been rounded up and hit with inflated charges, creating the illusion that he is bringing justice and order to a city supposedly overrun by dangerous criminals. One attorney called these charges “horseshit.” Indeed, many of these cases are likely to fail in court—and some already have. For example, a man accused of felony assault for throwing a sandwich at a federal agent was freed by a grand jury. Yet the narrative had already taken hold: D.C. was a war zone, and Trump was the general.

It’s classic Orwellian disinformation—create a fake crisis, deploy force, then claim victory. And yet, fake news doesn’t just come from politics; technology is making it even more dangerous.

AI Illusions: From Chatbots to Suicide Coaches

AI isn’t just clumsy; it’s lethal. Bots are now creating fake musicians, fake backstories, and fake histories that fool people into believing they’re real. Take “Rhoda Hardcok,” an AI country singer with vulgar songs on YouTube, social media accounts, and an invented tale about being censored in the 1970s. People online actually believe she exists.

But sometimes the consequences are far deadlier. California’s Attorney General found chatbots flirting with children, exposing them to sexualized content. One 76-year-old man, convinced he was in a romance with a chatbot named “Big Sis Billie,” tried to meet her in New York — only to die in a tragic fall while chasing a woman who never existed.

AI isn’t just luring the lonely; it’s enabling suicide. Before taking her life, Sophie, a 29-year-old, left a note that her mother said “didn’t sound like her.” It was later revealed that Sophie had asked a chatbot named Henry to edit the note so it would minimize her parents’ pain.

People aren’t just turning to AI for advice on writing suicide notes—they’re consulting it on whether to end their lives and, if so, how. Take Adam Raine, whose parents discovered after his suicide that ChatGPT had coached the sixteen-year-old to conceal his plans and even ‘practice’ methods. Even as Adam tried to reach out for help—showing his parents the scars from practicing hanging—the bot told him not to alert them, insisting that they would try to prevent the suicide.

And yet, Big Tech keeps selling AI as the future, claiming it’s stealing jobs and revolutionizing work. Political economist Mark Blyth disagrees, arguing that AI companies are overhyping both their current and future impact on the job market. Still, AI is here, and traditionally education has been relied on to help the public develop the skills and perspectives needed to understand and utilize new inventions. But rather than focusing on AI’s shortcomings, falsehoods, or dangers, schools have been struggling to keep up—focusing their attention on how to get students career-ready for AI or debating whether to ban AI in classrooms. Meanwhile, real dangers—such as how easily people mistake these systems for intelligence—go unaddressed.

At the same time, despite the biases and shortcomings in AI systems, they are increasingly making decisions critical to human lives. Economist Gary Smith has repeatedly shown that AI fails basic reasoning tests, and numerous studies have demonstrated that AI is largely unintelligent by human standards—some might even call it dumb. Others such as Meredith Broussard, a data journalism professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, note that AI follows human directions in how it processes information, meaning it reflects the biases of those instructions and the data used to train it.

Yet the Trump administration has proposed using these biased and largely unintelligent tools to determine Medicare eligibility. Imagine denying healthcare based on a system that can’t distinguish fact from fiction. Similarly, anti-ICE activists have started using AI to “out” undercover agents. While exposing abusive officers might feel righteous, what happens when the AI gets it wrong and the wrong person gets doxxed?

Fake News: The Glue Holding It All Together

From fake school shootings to flag-burning panics to AI hallucinations, fake news thrives because it preys on fear, anger, and confusion. A prank in Las Vegas is funny until it isn’t. A flag-burning “epidemic” doesn’t need to exist for it to mobilize millions. A chatbot doesn’t need to be smart to destroy a life.

Fake news isn’t just noise. It shapes how we think, vote, and grieve. It creates the crises politicians exploit, the distractions media profit from, and the illusions technology companies monetize. And unless we learn to see through it, fake news will keep writing the script of our reality.