No, Steve Grove is not the name of the ICE agent

Fighting a disinformation campaign that claimed "Steve Grove" was the ICE agent who shot Renee Nicole Good

Friends,

I hadn’t planned to send another newsletter so soon, but tragically our state is once again under fire. The fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE officer this week punctuated a brutal moment in which our city feels under siege. It’s hard to overstate how fraught things are here, as the administration has turned its attention on Minnesota. My heart is heavy for the family and friends of Ms. Good, and for all the families who are living in fear right now.

The Strib is hard at work doing what our newsroom does best - pursuing breaking, complex stories and getting people the truth. Our reporters are facing danger on the streets and online and I’m very proud of their work, which you can follow at the Strib.

Disinformation hits our doorstep

If there’s one thing you can depend on when tragedy strikes today, it’s this: conspiracy theorists and bad actors will spring into action online. They often masquerade as journalists, spreading fake news in coordinated campaigns designed to confuse or inflict harm.

This week, in the hours after the shooting of Renee Nicole Good by a masked ICE agent in south Minneapolis, they chose a strange target — me.

Just hours after the shooting, my phone began to buzz. I’m used to being tagged in social media posts about the Star Tribune’s coverage, but as I scrolled through the notifications, I saw something else entirely: hundreds of posts claiming that the ICE agent who shot Renee Nicole Good was Steve Grove of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Screenshots of an officer approaching Good’s minivan were labeled with my name, accompanied by explicit calls for vigilante justice.

“Let’s find his address… we will be his nightmare!” one post read. Thousands more followed, many using far harsher language.

Just one of the 5,000+ posts across multiple platforms that spread this fake news

Coincidence?

At first, I worried it was a horrible coincidence — that I shared a name with the shooter. But our newsroom hadn’t yet identified the ICE agent’s name, and as I looked more closely at the posts, something didn’t add up. The officer’s face looked subtly off, and he wasn’t wearing the mask seen in the videos of the shooting.

What was going on?

I called on friends to help me figure it out. One of them was Renée DiResta, an expert in online disinformation. She explained how online actors sometimes use Grok and other publicly available AI tools to “unmask” people in photographs. That appeared to be exactly what had happened here.

“What I would guess happened next is that someone uploaded that AI-generated image to a reverse image search platform, where it surfaced the name Steve Grove,” DiResta told me.

That explanation matched reporting by the Springfield Daily Citizen in Missouri, which interviewed another Steve Grove whose physical resemblance to the ICE agent was striking. He, too, was attacked online.

Diresta added that this behavior has become commonplace. “People often genuinely think they’re pursuing justice or helping their community, but the impact of the false positives can be terrible for the people named,” she told me.

NPR ran this story that showed how people are using Grok and other AI tools to “unmask” people, leading quickly to false conclusions

Morphing into an attack on the Strib

Even if we assume the intent of some of these efforts is good, the online mobs that rally quickly turn such campaigns into a disinformation nightmare.

A Minnesota-based behavioral intelligence startup called Gudea, which tracks how false social media claims go viral on the internet, tracked more than 5,000 posts claiming Steve Grove was the shooter. Within eight hours, they’d spread to seven different online platforms, and were being pushed a mixture of influencers, outliers, power players – and lots of bots. Soon, many threads metastasized into criticism of the Strib’s journalism.

“Once the lie came out, it just kept feeding on itself,” said Jonathan Sperber, Gudea’s co-founder.

For online mobs fueled by falsehoods, truth isn’t an inconvenience. It’s totally irrelevant. Once there’s a thread of controversy and a target, they pounce. The connection — however false — to the publisher of the Minnesota Star Tribune only made the target more appealing.

Even after our newsroom identified the real identity of the shooter, and national outlets like The Washington Post, NPR, Wired and others covered the story of this misinformation campaign, the rumors kept pouring in.

Unfortunately, the episode felt all too familiar. From the June 2025 political assassinations of former speaker of the Minnesota House Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, to the August 2025 Annunciation School shooting, to countless other tragedies in our state, misinformation on social media spreads faster than anyone can counter it.

We live in a world where speculation increasingly comes before verification. Outrage is rewarded, and the anonymity of the internet gives people a powerful vehicle to weaponize it.

Compare that with the work created by professionally trained and experienced journalists. When our journalists use AI, they do so carefully and responsibly — as our investigative team did during the Annunciation shooting to analyze massive amounts of data, with humans in the loop, to better understand the shooter’s motive.

You won’t find that commitment to truth or objectivity in an angry online mob.

Yet another reminder

I’m not sharing this story to ask for sympathy, that belongs entirely to the family and friends of Ms. Good, and to the thousands of Minnesotans who are living in fear right now.

I’m sharing it as yet another reminder for us to consider how we consume social media in moments of crisis. Rarely are you going to get the truth from following waves of online rage or vigilantism.

It’s also a reminder of the political tribalism we face in our country right now, as our Strib reporters have covered. As David Sturrock, a political science professor at Southwest Minnesota State University, shared on our pages:

“The impulse to ride confirmation bias to rushed conclusions has gone into hyperdrive in the social media age. A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes… And that was during the age of telegraphs.”

Instead, I hope people can remember in this moment the simple fact that the best place to get your news is directly from a trusted news organization. And the best way to support one is to subscribe, donate, or help sustain one you love.

Thank you

Many of you have reached out personally to check in this week, and Mary and I are grateful. We’re fine, and focused on what we can do to help right now. If you can, say a prayer for Minnesota.

Yours,

Steve