Debra Lea was a few blocks away from the Washington Hilton when she heard that the suspected gunman was dead.
She didn’t think twice before posting the information on X, with a selfie she’d taken earlier in the day.
“Shooter at WH correspondence [sic] dinner,” the 25-year-old conservative influencer and political commentator wrote in her post, including a red siren emoji to indicate breaking news. “The shooter is dead. Thank you secret service.” In the selfie, she was making a kissy face.
The backlash was immediate.
Lea inadvertently became the face of the capital’s influencer takeover, a new-media shift that has been met with considerable scorn. Online creators have insinuated themselves into the D.C. press corps, sitting for briefings with Karoline Leavitt and securing Pentagon credentials. They’ve become integral to elections and lobbying efforts. Last weekend, they were all over Washington, posting from parties around the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
They’ve also become easy targets when misinformation has spread, especially in developing news situations such as the one that unfolded on Saturday. Even as major news networks aired early, inaccurate information about the gunman, public ire was directed at influencers citing their reporting.
“I didn’t kill anybody, I didn’t hurt anybody,” Lea said in an interview on Monday. Her initial post was based on a report from CNN, which had cited a Secret Service agent who said the suspected shooter had been confirmed as dead. She said she deleted her tweet even before she knew it was inaccurate.
“This was an incredibly fluid breaking news situation,” a CNN spokesperson said in a statement. “As was said on air at the time, that information was not verified and came from Secret Service personnel inside of the ballroom. CNN immediately followed up when that reporting changed—that is responsible journalism.”
Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesperson for the Secret Service, said agents are told to communicate with witnesses what’s happening as traumatic events unfold.
“It is important to remember that that first blush of information is going to be incomplete, potentially inaccurate,” Guglielmi said. It can take hours, he added, to fully corroborate information based on eyewitness accounts and confirm details.
“People are always trying to delegitimize my own opinions and my platform,” said Lea, who has more than 180,000 followers on Instagram. “And then when something happens, I’m suddenly held to the highest level of journalistic integrity.”
Other influencers also relied on early mainstream news reports, such as Emilie Hagen, a comedian and influencer who gained prominence for covering the Sean “Diddy” Combs sex-trafficking trial on Substack and Instagram. Hagen recorded a video from inside one of the weekend’s parties with an on-screen caption saying that the shooter was dead.
In her video, she said she based the post on her mother’s recap of live CNN coverage and that she wasn’t fully certain if it was accurate. The next day, she followed up with a new video joking about the fact that she had accidentally shared “fake news,” and updated her original video’s caption to read: “Shooter was not dead. Breaking News is always the first draft of history.”
“As a content creator, you always want to be the first person to break the news,” said Hagen, a millennial who has about 140,000 Instagram followers and more than 12,000 Substack subscribers. “But that also comes with a risk.”
She said she’d trusted a mainstream outlet and didn’t expect her post to go viral. “Sometimes I think I’m just speaking to my core audience, not realizing the impact on the masses,” she said.
Aaron Parnas, 27, a lawyer and Substack journalist with almost 800,000 subscribers, close to 3 million Instagram followers and more than 5 million TikTok followers, also reported in a video that the shooter had been killed, attributing the information to CNN and Fox News.
He said in the video that a second shooter had been apprehended—the result of conflicting information about the suspect that he heard while at the Substack party, where people were getting real-time updates from dinner guests in the ballroom. Parnas has since removed the video. He said in an interview that he always takes down posts if he finds factual inaccuracies.
A Fox spokesperson pointed to a live segment in which the network quickly corrected the record as the situation developed. Fox News parent Fox Corp. and Wall Street Journal parent News Corp share common ownership
Lea does not feel that she made a mistake. She saw the reaction to her post as a learning opportunity.
“I posted a picture that wasn’t at the highest level of my own personal standard, and going forward, I would act a little bit differently,” she said.
Some commenters’ called for Lea to apologize for her error, which she refuses to do.
“We’re in this environment where if you ever slip up at all in any capacity, you get punished for apologizing,” she said.
Write to Ashley Wong at ashley.wong@wsj.com
