Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Reuters
A recent college graduate who became the target of a bizarre Twitter-based conspiracy theory this summer is suing Elon Musk for defamation, after Musk appeared to endorse the hoax.
Ben Brody, 22, claims his life was upended in June when right-wing accounts falsely identified him as a participant in a neo-Nazi brawl in Oregon. Musk amplified those false allegations, repeating them days after people told him that Brody was uninvolved with the group. Brody’s lawsuit, first reported by HuffPost, is being argued by Mark Bankston, an attorney who successfully sued InfoWars founder Alex Jones on behalf of parents of Sandy Hook victims.
Jones had wrongly claimed the Sandy Hook massacre was a “false flag”: a hoax staged to trick Americans into supporting gun laws. Musk, who has downplayed far-right extremism on Twitter and elsewhere, wrongly suggested that Brody’s alleged involvement in the neo-Nazi brawl meant that the event was also “a probable false flag situation.”