Who’s Making All These Fake Ottawa Terrorist Stories?

Five days after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police thwarted Aaron Driver's terrorist plot outside of London, Ontario, two other reports of terror attacks popped up on a variety of Facebook groups in Ottawa. These ones, however, were fake.

One of the photoshopped links states that there was a "brutal" ISIS attack in in Kanata, an Ottawa suburb, killing 92 people and wounding 187. The post shows a generic police photo and was added to a local Facebook trading page. A user named Sopo Khotivrishvili posted another invented story about a suicide bombing in the Ottawa Babywearing Group, a community for young moms. The article headlined the deaths of three police officers and eight citizens. There appears to be little rhyme or reason for the groups Khotivrishvili seems to be targeting and no one knows who's behind the undoubtedly fake profile. Ottawa police warned residents yesterday about the false posts going around. "These posts have been fabricated," police wrote on their Facebook page, with screenshots of the posts. "This falsified info may be circulating on Facebook with various city names." Megan Mills, an administrator of the Ottawa Babywearing Group told VICE that a member quickly flagged the post and it was removed by Facebook. "Facebook must have dealt with it so quickly that we never even saw the notification that she reported it to us," she told us. "I learned about it because I follow the Ottawa Police Service on Facebook." Mills said the group administrators usually screen member requests to make sure they are parents or moms, but apparently Khotivrishvili "looked like a legit person" when he was added to the group 23 hours prior because he had baby pictures. We tried contacting Khotivrishvili, but didn't get any response, obviously. Given the world is a scary place, and people like Trump want to convince us it's even scarier than it is, these posts are a pointless and dick move. Follow Ebony-Renee Baker on Twitter.