David Kirkpatrick’s New York Times piece on the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi attack has given new life to the US debate over the attack, provoking irate responses from conservative pundits and even a would-be refutation from Fox News. The contentious elements in Kirkpatrick’s reconstruction of the Benghazi events boil down to two main points: (1) that the infamous "anti-Islam video," which the Barack Obama administration initially suggested had provoked the attack, did indeed play a role in sparking the violence; and (2) that al-Qaeda had no hand in planning the attack or carrying it out. The second point has since received tacit endorsement from the US State Department, which, while designating two groups suspected of involvement in the attacks as terrorist organizations, has insisted that they are not “official” al-Qaeda affiliates.

Kirkpatrick’s evidence in support of his first point consists exclusively of hearsay reports from unidentified persons who were allegedly on the scene on the night of the attack. Kirkpatrick does say that by Sept. 9 “a popular eastern Libyan Facebook page had denounced the film.” But, regrettably, he does not identify the page in question. The claim thus remains unverifiable.

The weakness of Kirkpatrick’s evidence opened the breach for the attacks from the right. Fox News rushed into the breach, reporting that Agincourt Solutions, a “leading social media monitoring firm,” had found no trace of agitation regarding the video in Benghazi on the day of the attack. The first allusion to the film, per Fox News, was only to be found the following day. The report impressively claims that Agincourt Solutions had “vacuumed up” all the pertinent postings and analyzed them “using mathematical models.”

But Agincourt Solutions is wrong and Kirkpatrick is right. As already reported by Al-Monitor in July 2013, there is in fact hard evidence that the local Islamist scene in Benghazi was in uproar about the “anti-Islam video” in the run-up to the attack, and that this outrage figured prominently among the motivations of the assailants. This evidence is drawn precisely from social media.