Bellingcat reported Tuesday that Mauricio Garcia, the Allen, Texas mall shooter, had shared white supremacist memes on Russian social media.
www.businessinsider.com
Twitter appeared to limit the reach of investigative news site Bellingcat days after Elon Musk suggested its Texas mall shooter investigation was a 'psyop'
Pete Syme May 12, 2023, 7:52 AM EDT
Elon Musk and Eliot Higgins, the Bellingcat founder. ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images; Pierre Crom/Getty Images
- The investigative news website Bellingcat reported on the Texas mall shooter's apparent neo-Nazi beliefs.
- Right-wing commentators on Twitter suggested that it was fake news, and Elon Musk called it a "psyop."
- Days later, Bellingcat's founder said its Twitter account no longer appeared in the app's search tool.
Twitter appears to have limited the reach of Bellingcat, an investigative news website, as its main account no longer appears in the app's search tool.
It's unclear when exactly the change was made but Eliot Higgins, the Bellingcat founder, first
tweeted about it Thursday. Bellingcat's main handle did not appear in several searches made by Insider on Twitter Friday.
Higgins' first tweet about the account being hidden came three days after Elon Musk began spreading doubt over the site's investigation into Mauricio Garcia, the gunman who
killed eight people at a mall in Allen, Texas on Sunday.
Bellingcat reported that Garcia had tattoos of a swastika and other Nazi symbols, and
posted about being a white supremacist on Odnoklassniki (OK), a Russian social media site.
"Didn't the story come from Bellingcat, which literally specializes in psychological operations?" Musk
tweeted. "I don't want to hurt their feelings, but this is either the weirdest story ever or a very bad psyop!"
The Twitter boss tweeted about the investigation several times, like
replying "Odd" to a conspiratorial tweet from an account called "End Wokeness."
Bellingcat has also been
accused of working for the CIA, a claim Higgins has repeatedly
denied.
The site reported that it discovered Garcia's OK account after investigators disclosed its existence to the
New York Times. The shooter had also posted legal documents identifying himself.
Bellingcat has the gold checkmark for businesses on Twitter, but Higgins
withdrew his own blue tick in the wake of accusations that its Texas mall shooter story was a "psyop."
Psychological operations are broadly defined as military operations designed to influence people's emotions and political beliefs through propaganda, but the term "psyop" has been co-opted frequently by online conspiracy theorists to accuse the US government of false flag operations like terror attacks and mass shootings.
Aric Toler, the Bellingcat journalist who reported the story, also that the site's account hadn't been appearing on TweetDeck searches for weeks.
In April, he co-wrote the
New York Times article which revealed the identity of Jake Teixeira, the National Guard airman who
leaked hundreds of classified documents on Discord.
That report involved matching up social media images of Teixeira's house with the counter seen in the background of the leaked document pictures to identify him. But with Garcia, Toler said it was "easily the most open-and-shut case I've seen in my life."
Insider contacted Twitter for comment. The company responded with an automated message that didn't address the inquiry.
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www.theverge.com
Johnny Cab strikes again.
