How do we know that was actually his social media account?

It was only on Tuesday that the account was finally taken down. “It is possible that he was using this account as a sort of personal diary where he would not be subject to content moderation,” Toler noted in his findings. Musk, too, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the shooter’s Odnoklassniki profile, saying it seemed “very odd that would have a Russian social media account when he doesn’t speak Russian.” This conveniently ignored that the shooter wrote in English, didn’t engage or follow other users on the site, and was possibly posting there because the network wouldn’t immediately suspend him for hate speech, as YouTube and Facebook often had. Pool has defensively labeled the shooter’s profile itself a “ fake.” Toler found evidence on the Odnoklassniki profile that the Texas shooter was a fan of Pool’s and reposted his work, which is presumably part of the reason that Pool and his associates want to discredit the Bellingcat report. The person he’s been discussing this with, “The Redheaded Libertarian,” happens to be a political commentator known for collaborating with podcaster Tim Pool, who regularly platforms far-right conspiracy theorists and white nationalists. With these replies, Musk lent support to overlapping conspiracy theories.īellingcat has been baselessly smeared as a CIA front by its detractors, including those it reports on - and Monday, in a previous tweet exchange, Musk appeared to accept the claim that Toler is a “CIA operative” at face value. It might all be true, but such an incongruent set of claims deserves extreme scrutiny

Race talk and the conspiracy of silence