FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver and NBC’s Ben Collins Each Accuse the Other of Spreading Misinformation in Nasty Twitter Spat

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In a vicious Twitter exchange on Monday, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver and NBC News reporter Ben Collins each took shots at each other’s work.

“Mastodon seems like a honeytrap for hall-monitor personality types. Honestly if Elon gets all the hall monitors to migrate to Mastodon that might be his greatest contribution toward the betterment of humanity,” tweeted Silver, referring to Elon Musk and the social media company Mastodon.

“Hall monitors” is a term for those on Twitter who call out others for disinformation or for having a viewpoint they disagree with.

Collins, who covers misinformation for NBC, retweeted Silver’s post and added, “Don’t you have some elections to be wrong about?”

FiveThirtyEight incorrectly predicted that the GOP would take back the Senate — but only gave the party a 51 percent chance to do so, as opposed to other prognosticators who were much more certain of a red wave. The site gave the GOP an 80 percent chance of winning control of the House, which they did, but only barely in that FiveThirtyEight gave the highest chances of winning 227 seats. The party is likely to win 222 seats, which is only four more than the needed 218 for a majority in the lower congressional chamber.

Silver, who has expressed frustration over those who dunk on him for incorrect predictions and not knowing what his site does or how polling works, took off the gloves.

“This is misinformation,” he fired back at Collins.

“Like seriously: unlike you, Ben, we actually take accountability for what we say. Our entire forecast track record over 14 years is here. We are good at our jobs, though it doesn’t help to have reporters like you who are so clueless about probability,” added Silver, including a link to a page touting FiveThirtyEight’s work.

Taking a shot at Collins’ beat, Silver accused Collins of being “very partisan” and spreading disinformation, which Collins supposedly pushes back on.

“Maybe I’m overgeneralizing from a sample of two or three people but, like, the most prominent ‘misinformation reporters’ are both very partisan and very often spread misinformation. The whole category is [full of red flags],” he tweeted with red flag emojis.

Without a substantive response, Collins retweeted Silver’s initial tweet with a GIF of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson rolling his eyes.

“Can’t believe these are real living guys on seven-figure salaries who manage human adults, talking about ‘hall monitors’ like they’re in the 8th grade. Great googly moogly. Anyway, back to reporting,” he added.

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