NBC Senior Reporter Ben Collins appeared to be on the verge of tears while blaming Elon Musk for the loss of the country's democracy because of a tweet expressing skepticism over the official story being told on the break-in at the home of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D).
Musk shared a link to a blog post with speculation on what occurred in response to Hillary Clinton's tweet about the incident. The information in the post was inaccurate, and Musk deleted the tweet. There has been some confusion over what actually happened during the break-in and assault on Pelosi's husband, Paul, since police and reporters have changed the story.
"So first of all, lies on the Internet move faster than the truth. And that's, in part, why there are all these safeguards that Elon Musk is trying to take down on Twitter right now. The lies that were pushed were from a bad piece of information they found," Collins said on Monday.
"If we don't cut this out right now, not just the normalization of violence, but the idea that reality can't even exist anymore because it cannot catch up to lies on the Internet...This is how it gets really bad. This is the start of something that gets really, really bad. If you are getting the guardrails off the truth where it literally cannot catch up to the lies on the Internet, because of how the pipes work, how the system works, because of the incentives of the richest people in the world, then that's how you lose your democracy," he added.
I talked this morning about Elon Musk, his Paul Pelosi conspiracy theory, and how you lose a democracy in the age of the internet. pic.twitter.com/WLikKY32Ll
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) October 31, 2022
Questions being raised over the incident have been fueled by what appears to be rushed reporting or sourcing being not up to par. Initially, there were reports of a third person being in the home, who let the police in. Now that might not be the case. It was reported that the man who attacked Paul Pelosi was in his underwear, and now that has changed as well.
