The online discourse after three recent shootings, including the one on June 22 in Montreal, was disproportionately concentrated on gender rather than on the actual act of violence, a new study has found. In the case of Montreal, engagement on online posts about a female officer’s involvement in the shooting far outweighed posts about other subjects, despite the low volume of posts about her gender in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, which left another officer, an innocent civilian, and the shooter dead. That was one of the findings in an incident report published Wednesday by the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, an interdisciplinary team of researchers based at McGill University. They found that “identity-oriented content” was among the types of content that drew the most reactions on social media after the June 2026 Montreal shooting, the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September 2025, and the shooting in Tumbler Ridge in February 2026. In those shootings, gender was “politicized within hours … with influencers leading this kind of framing,” according to the report. Following the Montreal shooting, Quebec’s Domestic Security Minister, Ian Lafrenière, urged people not to share graphic videos of the shooting, including one that appeared to show a female officer shooting a civilian. The shooters’ affiliation with the trans community dominated the discourse in the case of the Kirk shooting and the shooting in Tumbler Ridge. In the case of Montreal, posts scrutinizing the female officer had disproportionately higher views relative to the low number of posts there were about her gender. Influencers, the vast majority of which are American (88 per cent vs. 10 per cent), had a central role in disseminating the discourse around gender and accounted for at least 98 per cent of engagement with “identity-politicizing content, the incident report noted. To put the engagement in perspective, the researchers found that posts about the Montreal police officer’s gender received approximately 4.3 times more engagement on average than informational updates about the shooting itself, even though posts about gender only made up 3 per cent of online posts overall. “This illustrates how social media users can be drawn to more controversial or speculative interpretations of emerging breaking news stories,” the report stated. The researchers combed through social media posts across X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Bluesky following the June shooting in Montreal. They found one post on X that questioned the female Montreal police officer’s competence, writing, “What the hell are we doing allowing female police officers.” Esli Chan, senior research fellow at the Media Ecosystem Observatory, told CTV News there is a trend in the literature where gender is often invoked as a conflictual debate and that women are framed as “inadequate.” “It’s a way to frame these incidents in a way to blame gender, often in ways that are reinforcing gendered stereotypes, or inequality, or explanations for why traditional patriarchal hierarchies should persist,” Chan said in an interview. “It’s a way to kind of scapegoat what’s happening and turn the conversation elsewhere.” Quebec’s independent police watchdog, the Bureau des enquêtes Indépendantes (BEI), has opened an investigation into the Montreal police intervention. The researchers also found that posts showing uncensored graphic violence also had higher engagement, and that those posts overwhelmingly came from influencers or bystander reporting, rather than traditional media. For example, a graphic video of the Montreal shooting was posted by the Breaking911 account on X, which is based in Nashville, Tenn., garnered 37 million views alone. Chan said social media users should be careful about the content they consume, especially immediately after shootings when there is an “information vacuum” that is prime time for online actors to make certain narratives viral to monetize them. Social media platforms also have a role to play, she added, “particularly in the kind of content that exists on their platforms and what gets pushed into the top of people’s feeds.”
