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Monetizing Evil
Seems some people will do anything to drive traffic to their website. Imagine my shock at reading that Charleston Race-Hate Terrorist Dylan Roof has been bailed from jail by a white supremacist millionaire. Or, if you're reading other sites, he's been bailed by donations gathered from a klu-klux-klan kickstarter. Of course it turns out it's a hoax.
Fortunately I'm not on twitter, because if I was, I'd by now have charged on there, as so many other people have, to express my outrage that Roof is at liberty, or that anyone would support him. Now, I admit that some of the outraged comments seem to come from the social justice types that I'm so critical of these days, but they've got every right to be outraged by these stories. There's no reason for them to doubt the truth of the reports, because a degree of effort has been put into making the reports/webpages look plausible. In this situation it's the twitterati who are the victims, they've been manipulated by amoral rumour-mongers. Likely the motivation is to drive clicks to certain websites, because in this day and age clicks mean money.
I don't doubt that some will try to claim this was a social experiment, or a hoax to make certain types of people look dumb. All I see it as being is an abuse of trust, a dishonest play on people's emotions at a time when they're vulnerable, and another firecracker thrown into an already fraught situation by chaos actors with no concern about the consequences of their actions, or the distress their lies might cause to the bereaved. If you do this, then whatever your motivation, you're no better than the type of people who try to use the Tunisia attacks to drum up fear of minorities in the west. No doubt this will prove to be another one of those rumors that never quite goes away, and which informs people's thinking for years to come (bit like the persistent rumors that Obama's a Muslim).
Just goes to show, whenever you think there's a level that people won't sink to, someone proves you wrong.