Michael Mallinson received a harried call from his daughter shortly after Charlie Kirk, the right-wing influencer, was shot in Utah on Wednesday.

She said that his photo was circulating online and that he had been identified — falsely — as the shooter.

In a phone interview Wednesday, Mallinson said he was a 77-year-old retired banker who lived and was in Toronto. But thousands of posts on social media claimed he was a registered Democrat from Utah who had shot and killed Kirk. The mix-up was apparently because of his resemblance to a man who was briefly detained by the police after the shooting.

“I’m just shocked by it,” he said in the interview Wednesday. “How quickly it can happen, how one’s name and photo can get spread around quite quickly.”

In the frantic aftermath of major breaki

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