A conspiracy spread on social media and exacerbated by Twitter owner Elon Musk forced a recent college graduate and his mother into hiding.
What Happened: Ben Brody, 22, found himself at the center of a storm after he was wrongly identified as a neo-Nazi involved in a far-right brawl during an Oregon City pride festival, an event that took place over 850 miles away from his home in California, according to Vice News.
Brody, a political science grad from UC Riverside, had innocuously mentioned on his Instagram, managed by his Jewish fraternity, his aspiration to work for the government one day.
According to the Vice report, that minor detail was seized by “right-wing conspiracy theorists,” who alleged that Brody was a federal agent masquerading as a neo-Nazi …