“The Minnesota Star Tribune also visited all 10 facilities, and found children inside four of them when invited inside. Six other facilities were either closed or employees did not open their doors.
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Osman said the doors are always locked for safety, and the staff was on high alert following the president’s threats to deport Somali people and escalation of federal immigration enforcement in the Twin Cities.
He said Shirley’s unannounced drop-in was “not intended to be a sincere approach.””
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Director Ahmed Hasan said they’ve had similar visits from other “content creators,” but the others didn’t have enough followers to create the kind of chaos that Shirley did.
Hasan said Shirley, a man identified as “David” and a third man came to the front door while five more men waited in a van and car, some of them wearing masks.
Hasan said there were children inside, but they weren’t about to let strangers inside, given the recent immigration crackdown. They thought the masked men in the vehicles might be ICE agents.
Hasan said Shirley left soon after Hasan arrived, entering through a back door.
On Dec. 30, Hasan invited the Star Tribune and other media outlets into the facility, where about 30 children of varying ages were visible.
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A woman from a neighboring home health care agency showed the Star Tribune video footage of children coming and going on Dec. 16.
Kevin Brown, who lives two blocks away and owns a business next door to ABC Learning Center, said he often sees kids at the center.
He saw Shirley’s video and came over to the daycare Dec. 30 when he saw TV cameras there.
“I don’t like the idea of people coming from out of town, coming into our neighborhood and making assumptions without talking to people and getting the facts,” he said. “That’s the definition of fake news.”
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Part-owner Umi Hassan said she lived here right after 9/11 and didn’t feel as marginalized and fearful as she does today. She’s unable to sleep at night and carries her passport everywhere.
Tears running down her face, she asked, “What else can I do to be an American?””
Shirley posted videos of childcare centers than he claimed showed they were fraudulent because no one answered when he visited them, but many of them were active daycares, which don’t answer the doors to groups of men for security concerns. Both government investigations and real reporters who followed up on Shirley’s shoddy work found the daycare centers to be active centers taking care of kids.
Somalis in Minnesota were involved in fraudulent welfare schemes that stole a buttload of money from the U.S. government. Minnesota state officials were getting wind of the crimes, but failed to act in part because they feared being called racist in the post-George Floyd environment. Instead of seriously thinking about how to crack down on such schemes, Trump responded by calling all Somalis trash and saying he doesn’t want any Somalis in the country.
“Social media platforms have birthed viral rumors for more than a decade, but in recent years some online platforms have shifted radically away from content moderation and fact-checking while monetarily incentivizing viral posting. After Musk bought Twitter, which he renamed X, the service reinstated many previously banned users, stopped enforcing some rules about hateful content and began sharing revenue with users if they get engagement. This year, Instagram and Facebook’s parent company, Meta, stopped fact-checking in the United States. Meta is rolling out a crowdsourced “community notes” system, like a system on X in which users submit their own addenda to other users’ posts, which other users then vote on. Use of the system on X has plummeted since the beginning of this year, according to an NBC News analysis. X didn’t respond to a request for comment on the conspiracy theories on its app.
Now, the apps are fertile ground for hoaxes and unconfirmed accusations to spread, experts said.
“The design of social media platforms facilitates and even incentivizes this kind of rumoring and political point-scoring in the wake of crisis events,” Kate Starbird, a professor and co-founder at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, said in an email.
“Some of the most prominent accounts on X gained their audiences by strategically posting breaking news content with a political angle for clicks and follows,” Starbird said.
Even though federal prosecutors filed a criminal complaint against Boelter, Republicans continued to spread the seemingly false narrative Monday.”
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““There’s this rush to create the first narrative, and this is really crucial if you want to spread misinformation. And it’s not very difficult, because it will always take more time for the real information to come out,” he said.
“Once the narrative takes hold, it’s very, very difficult to debunk,” he said.”