Russian propaganda often targets society’s marginalized groups, in particular LGBTQ+ people, often to use their presence to demonstrate the “degradation” and “depravity” of various countries in the West to their audience, inside Russia and beyond. This time, Russian telegram channels shared a post that seems to include FBI statistics, according to which 74% of people who organized school shootings in the United States have identified as transgender. Our fact-checking department investigated this claim.
What happened?
Telegram channels Kostian Kat (“Кот Костян — официальний канал”) and Shaman Rahu (“Шаман Раху”) that systematically spread Russian propaganda published the post that referred to FBI statistics.
The statistics, they said, showed that during the last 30 months, 74% of people responsible for school shootings (planning and organizing them) “identified themselves as transgender, supported transgenders or LGBTQ-community in general.” As evidence for this claim, the post offers a video with the logo of the French news agency AFP (L’Agence France-Presse, AFP).
“That creates, the FBI thinks, a dangerous tendency: a teen society divides into those who favor LGBT or belongs to it [LGBT] — and those who consider themselves normal [the literal translation would be “considers himself normal” because of gendered adjectives in Russian — ed.]
Analysis
The post includes the video with the AFP logo, so, to verify the claim, we searched through official resources of this agency. AFP was founded in 1944 in Paris, and currently it’s one of the biggest international news agencies. Its official resources include a website, and pages on social media Х, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
We’ve analyzed video content on the platforms on social media that uses video in the 9:16 format (Reels on Instagram and Facebook, Shorts on YouTube), and discovered the following inconsistencies.
- The white logo in the video posted on Telegram is actually used for video in the 16:9 format, posted on X and YouTube (1, 2). AFP doesn’t create separate videos for the website; they post YouTube videos on it instead.
But on all videos we watched on official resources, the agency’s logo isn’t displayed during the entire video; it appears at the beginning for a few seconds, then disappears, unlike on the video shared by pro-Russian Telegram channels.
After analyzing video content on all of AFP’s platforms, we didn’t find the news shared on Telegram channels. We decided to search through AFP’s text content via search queries “trans and LGBTQ,” “mass shootings,” “FBI statistics,” “30 months,” “74% of teens.” News pieces with the corresponding context were absent both on the website and on AFP’s social media.
Next, we searched through the official FBI website for statistics referred to in Telegram posts by keywords. Looking for the keywords “trans and LGBTQ” mentioned during the last two months, we only found two articles.
The last news that has any connection to LGBTQ+ is the news from Aug 13 about a man from San Diego accused of sending threats to LGBTQ+ people.
Next, we continued the search via the keyword “mass shootings.” Among the results were news, press releases, and messages about the FBI’s campaign for the prevention of mass violence.
It’s a campaign with a social ad from the FBI’s behavioral unit that urges people to “pay attention to signs that may show someone is potentially on a path to committing mass violence” and instructs on how one can report such behavior. No mentions of paying specific attention to LGBTQ+ people.
So, we’ve analyzed the FBI’s website and didn’t find any posts or articles with research related to mass shootings conducted by people from the LGBTQ+ community with statistics for the last 30 months.
What statistics says
We found The Violence Project, a public resource that registers data about mass shootings in the USA from 1966, in which “four or more” people were killed.
Reuters writes that, according to The Gun Violence Archive (GVA), as of Sept 2024, transgender people have been found guilty of less than 1% of mass shootings in the last decade and around 2% of school shootings.
In 2023, The Violence Project’s spokesperson told Reuters that the case of the “Nashville shooter” (shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee on Mar 27, 2023), in which the suspect reportedly identified as transgender, was the first case of a trans perpetrator in their database.
The other research into this topic was conducted by the American National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC), which studies all forms of intentional violence, including mass attacks. In 2023, the Center published a report with data for 2016-2020. In the report, they analyze 173 cases that occurred in America and “caused harm to three or more people in public places,” said the press secretary of the USA’s Secret Service to Reuters, and “three perpetrators (2%) were transgender: they identified as men while being assigned female at birth.”
According to their analyses of mass shootings, almost all perpetrators, or 96% of them, have been cisgender men, and the rest (five out of 173) have been cisgender women.
As such, the post spread by pro-Russian Telegram channels saying 74% of school shootings in the USA were organized by trans people or other people from the LGBTQ+ community with a link to statistics is a fake piece that aimed to villainize trans people and demonstrate the “degradation” of the West.
Conclusion: Fake
Author: Olha Yakovleva
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