Police dispel online rumors of officer being shot on Hilton Head
Police on Tuesday said that online reports of an officer being shot on Hilton Head Island were “completely false.”
Users of the neighborhood-based social media app Nextdoor received an alert Tuesday morning saying a user reported an officer had been shot and was “down” near the island’s airport on Beach City Road, and that a suspect had fled into the woods.
The Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office clarified there were “no reports” of a shooting in the Hilton Head area on Tuesday and no deputies had been injured.
The false “safety alert” on Nextdoor appeared to originate from a short clip of dispatch audio that was attributed to local fire crews. Joheida Fister, a spokesperson for Hilton Head Island Fire-Rescue, said that attribution was false.
A number of crime news services automatically generated an alert based on the 10-second clip, spreading the misinformation across Beaufort County within minutes.
It was not immediately clear how the audio was misconstrued or what type of event was connected to the dispatch clip, which was timestamped at 8:08 a.m. Tuesday.
“We’ve got an officer down, we’ve got an officer down, an officer down by a tree,” read the transcript of the dispatch audio as heard on apps like NewsBreak and CrimeRadar. The man on the recording then mentions an unknown male suspect that “ran off into the woods.”
The alerts included a disclaimer that the transcript was “automatically generated and may contain inaccuracies.”
Representatives from the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office and Hilton Head Island Fire-Rescue said reviews of their call logs yielded no events that matched the contents of the dispatch audio.
The sheriff’s office said any “confirmed threat to public safety” would be communicated through the agency’s official platforms, including Everbridge alerts and social media platforms like Facebook and Nextdoor.
“We urge the public to avoid spreading unverified information online and to rely on official sources for accurate updates,” the BCSO alert said.
The department added that “additional unverified reports have referenced an incident involving Walmart.”
NewsBreak, one of the most-downloaded news apps in the U.S., has faced scrutiny for using artificial intelligence to publish articles, resulting in false information and sometimes completely fictitious news.
In December 2023, the app posted a report about a fatal Christmas Day shooting in a small New Jersey town. Local police released a statement calling the story “entirely false.”
“Nothing even similar to this story occurred on or around Christmas, or even in recent memory for the area they described,” the department said. “It seems this ‘news’ outlet’s AI writes fiction they have no problem publishing to readers.”
This story was originally published September 23, 2025 at 1:46 PM.
