Did you like or share that social media post about two Camp Mystic girls found in a tree?

It’s still unclear who started a widely shared rumor over the weekend that raised false hopes of desperate parents that two girls had been found alive clinging to a tree around Comfort or Center Point.

I first saw the rumor spread on Facebook where a user mentioned it in passing during a live video post on debris-clearing efforts. I raced to a law enforcement command center in Kerrville to ask the public information officer about it. I could see in his exhausted eyes that he wanted it to be true but he told me he couldn’t confirm the story. By the end of the conversation, we were both in tears. Later that night, in another video, the Facebook user apologized profusely, saying he’d only shared something told to him by a law enforcement officer whom he had no reason to doubt.

Others are motivated by much darker forces, including profiting from lies and scams.

Shortly after interviewing the Houston middle-school camper and her mom, they sent a fearful text asking me not to use their names. Mom said she’d just seen fake posts using girls’ names and hoaxes exploiting their identities. She sent me an obit about a girl who was still alive and a TikTok post suggesting another girl did something “creepy” to aid her own survival.

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It’s similar to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ campaign against Sandy Hook families, accusing grieving parents of fabricating the deaths of 20 first-graders who were gunned down in a mass shooting in 2012.

The motivation? Money, apparently. His baseless claims earned hundreds of millions in sales, says Bill Ogden, a Houston attorney who represented five family members who sued for defamation and won combined jury verdicts of more than $1 billion.

“They can hide behind ‘I was just asking questions’ but if you ask the questions and you never, ever go look for the answers, you’re just monetizing a tragedy at somebody else’s expense,” Ogden told me Tuesday.

It’s an important reminder, even for good-intentioned people who sometimes forget the line between healthy skepticism and perpetuating conspiracies.

Ogden says exploiting tragedies is probably a fact of life in this Internet age but he says good people don’t have join in. Most adults are capable of basic fact-checking and cursory searches for reputable news and government sources before sharing questionable claims. —Camp Mystic families are hurting enough. Stop the hate, hoaxes and rumors