California Man Wrongly Accused of Being a Neo-Nazi Federal Agent By Twitter Conspiracy Theorists — And Elon Musk — Speaks Out

Ben Brody, a recent college graduate from Southern California, was falsely accused of being a federal agent posing as a neo-Nazi, making him a pawn in a pervasive far-right conspiracy theory that went viral on Twitter and was amplified by Elon Musk.

Vice News reporter Mack Lamoureax spoke with Brody, and the 20-something said he couldn’t sleep after becoming the subject of conspiracy theories that led to his doxxing:

Everything that I tried to work for and all this is just completely gone. And I genuinely felt very anxious, very nervous. I felt like I was going to have a panic attack. I couldn’t sleep. I was like, walking around and just, like, pacing because I was just so nervous about everything.

The story starts over 850 miles away from Brody, where two masked members of the Rose City Nationalists were caught on camera with their masks off during a pride event in Oregon City. Right-wing Twitter users claimed the neo-Nazis involved in a violent clash with Proud Boys were federal agents, prompting sleuths to try and uncover the identity of the unmasked men.

One of the men looked enough like Brody to merit a (false) identification, which led to the Instagram account for the Jewish fraternity Brody belonged to and a post saying that after the political science student graduated, “he plans to work for the government.”

So after a loose identification that yielded Brody’s name and an Instagram post, Brody was cast by right-wing conspiracy theorists as a federal agent pretending to be a neo-Nazi for the purpose of making conservatives look bad. The false accusation spread like wildfire among fringe outlets, but once it made it to Twitter, it was Musk who threw gasoline on the flames. Per Vice:

Almost immediately after Brody’s name and information were shared and it didn’t take long for the usual suspects to amplify the conspiracy to their millions of followers. Twitter owner Elon Musk replied to multiple instances of false information about Brody being shared on his platform, boosting it to his over 147 million followers. In one case he responded directly to an article from Zero Hedge, a site well known for its far-right leanings and conspiratorial content.

“Looks like one is a college student (who wants to join the government) and another is maybe an Antifa member, but nonetheless a probably false flag situation,” Musk wrote under the article that shared Brody’s name and photo. While Zero Hedge has deleted their tweet and walked back their accusations in the article, Musk has not deleted his Tweet which currently has over a million views.

As of this writing, it looks like the tweet from June 27 that appears in Lamoureaux’s article is no longer live, but the article that went up on Tuesday stated it was up at the time of publication and had 1.2 million views. To be fair, Musk was also not the only prominent figure to amplify the fake story, which elicited several anti-Semitic responses by the people who bought the story. Many of the tweets accusing Brody of being “antifa” or a “fed” are still live.

But then there was some ironic blowback to the fake Nazi conspiracy theory — from actual Nazis. Per Vice:

“Musk Twitter is a massive setback for our discourse. It’s a layered psy op making crazy people even crazier,” wrote one prominent Nazi. “None of these… really believe Ben Brody is the same person, they are writing lies for attention.”

Like most news cycles, the interest in the fake story waned once some started becoming suspicious of the accusations. But so much of the incident still has a digital paper trail, which worries Brody, who is now on the job hunt:

“Obviously, I’m more than willing to explain the situation and stuff like that, but just having that label up itself is very hard for employers,” said Brody. “That is just like a lot to deal with… the uncertainty, the fear.”

It’s not the first time misinformation on Twitter ran rampant under Musk’s leadership, nor the first time he amplified it.

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