Author: Al Jazeera
Published on: 25/05/2025 | 00:00:00
AI Summary:
A bystander’s video showed officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for about nine minutes in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as Floyd pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. The footage sparked weeks of global protests against police brutality and racism. It contributed to a jury’s murder conviction against Chauvin and a federal investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department. In 2023 after a two-year investigation sparked by Floyd’s death, the US Department of Justice found that the city of Minneapolis and its police department engaged in a pattern of civil rights violations. The narrative that Floyd died of an overdose persisted through the involved police officers’ criminal trials and beyond their convictions. It was one of many false statements about Floyd’s actions, his criminal history and the protests that followed his murder. How conservative influencers distort an autopsy report to push overdose claim Chauvin killed Floyd after police were called to a corner grocery store where Floyd was suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill. News reports about Floyd’s criminal record – which included three drug charges, two theft cases, aggravated robbery and trespassing – fuelled false claims about his background. The Hennepin County medical examiner’s office reported “fentanyl intoxication” and “recent Misinformation experts say it’s not surprising that Floyd and the 2020 protests remain a target of false portrayals years later because of the widespread attention Floyd’s death drew at a time when online platforms incentivise inflammatory commentary. The drug overdose narrative proliferated in conjunction with the October 2022 release of Owens’s film about Floyd and The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, parroted the false narrative in an October Ramesh Srinivasan, an information studies professor at the University of California-Los Angeles Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, said social media algorithms don’t allow nuanced conversations that require detail and context. A person’s online visibility and virality, which can directly correlate to their revenues in some cases, improves when a person takes extreme, antagonistic, partisan or hardened positions. Freelon said the internet has “added fuel to the fire” and broadened misinformation’
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Summary: 343 words
Percent reduction: 71.15%