Did The AP Report On The Navy Yard Attack A Day Before It Happened? Eh …

I’m a false flag, you’re a false flag, everyone is a false flag, according to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. But when the conspiracy crowd pulls up persuasive evidence that seemingly proves that major media outlets like The Associated Press reported on tragedies like the Washington D.C. Navy Yard shooting days before it actually happened… well, what the heck can you say to that?

I’m going to show you why, when your Facebook friends share screencaps of Google search returns dating reports of the Navy Yard shooting a day before it happened, you can still say “false flag, this isn’t.”

Aaron Alexis’ crimes took place shortly after 8:20 AM on the morning of September 16, 2013. He killed 12 people, injured 14, and was killed himself in a subsequent shootout with police.

Some observers spotted that afternoon that an Associated Press report on the events was actually dated September 15, 2013… a full day before the Navy Yard shooting.

Conspiracy forums and sites had a veritable heyday with this, creating YouTube videos and sharing screencaps that seem to cinch the argument in favor of conspiracy. President Obama wants our guns, and after failing to get them by staging Sandy Hook, he needed to create another crisis to pass his legislation, or something.

But I’m going to tell you with absolute confidence right now that all of this conspiracy stuff is just crap.

The main reason this is crap is because, in case you forgot, this happens all the time after every huge tragedy.

A few examples:

There was supposedly a Facebook memorial created for the Boston bombing victims two days before the fateful marathon. This ended up being debunked pretty handily, because conspiracy hounds were trusting a page’s creation date when it has long been understood that some people make money by creating pages and then filling them with whatever is topical to ramp up followers. Then, they sell the page to whoever will pay for 25,000 “likes” and that customer purges the page and re-brands it with their wares.

Sandy Hook and Aurora had date faux pas, as well. In addition to pre-event memorial pages on Facebook, search engine results also place reports days, even weeks before each respective event. Why?

Because as scary and all-powerful as Google is, they actually kind of suck with date-restricted searching. There’s a whole reddit thread dedicated to this where user Oltimega illustrates the phenomenon with the Sandy Hook tragedy:

You’re not about to tell me that the Sandy Hook shooting occurred more than 10 years ago, are you?

Back to the D.C. Navy Yard shooting, hoax busters at Snopes point out that the error wasn’t even necessarily that of the Associated Press, but rather that of a few sites that carried the article. The article in question was in fact written after the event on September 16, but in the process of disseminating copy across the online news network (which is plugged in to hundreds if not thousands of other publications) the date glitched a couple of times. This happens.

And the few publications that it happened to issued corrections.

So even if you see this floating around Facebook:

There’s a perfectly rational explanation for it, and you kind of have to admit its merit when compared to the ever-shrinking piles of “evidence” guarded by some who want to believe that the U.S. government flies airplanes into buildings and dispatches military strike teams to execute elementary school students.

Of course, your conspiracy pals aren’t going to believe this. They’ll say that Snopes and Google are bought and paid for, photos are manipulated and witnesses are hushed. This little bit of hoax slaying is really only for you, the reader who doesn’t think the conspiracies are true but aren’t sure why.

Also, can we please stop using the term “false flag?”