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Ben Collins, who covers disinformation, extremism and the internet for NBC News, faced fierce backlash for a series of tweets pointing to a persistent toothache as a major factor in the racist Buffalo mass shooting.
On Friday, Collins published a lengthy Twitter thread about last Saturday’s terrifying racist attack, which killed ten people and wounded another three. The shooting suspect — an 18 year-old white man named Payton Gendron — said in an online manifesto that he was inspired by a racist ideology called “replacement theory,” versions of which Tucker Carlson and a host of other Republican personalities, elected officials, and candidates have publicly espoused.
But Collins’ thread began in different territory, noting that “The Buffalo shooter had a toothache.”
Over the course of a dozen tweets, Collins wrote about the suspect’s radicalization via white supremacist disinformation and that persistent toothache, which the shooter blamed on “the Jews.”
Collins’ summation:
A new thing recently is to say that “disinformation” doesn’t it exist, that it’s a “liberal”
idea, or that it’s masking real problems.But disinformation is an accelerant. It provides facile, wrong, violent solutions to real problems that need solutions in our society.Disinformation exists, and it exists mostly to shift the blame of infrastructural decay and resource limitations from the powerful to the powerless.You can call it “information warfare” or “information operations” if you want, but it is real.People are dead because of it.The Buffalo shooter had a toothache.He blamed Jews because his online community told him they were the root of all evil.He shot up a supermarket for revenge, but also because he wanted healthcare in prison.Disinformation is real. So are the problems that make it seductive.
The thread prompted fierce disagreement from media figures and other verified Twitter users who weren’t convinced of the merits of Collins’ take.
Collins did have his defenders. MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace called the thread a “Must read” and gun control activist Cameron Kasky — himself a survivor of the Parkland massacre — pushed back on the backlash in a now-deleted tweet. There were others:
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