Yesterday, CNN’s “New Day” aired a horrifying story about an Army reservist who has been the target of a particularly heinous smear campaign. One of the most noxious conspiracy peddlers on YouTube has falsely accused her of bringing coronavirus to China.
Last year, Maatje Benassi took part in the Military World Games, essentially a military version of the Olympics. Since March, Internet bottomfeeders have used her presence there to claim that she brought the virus to China.
Maatje Benassi competed in the cycling competition there, suffering an accident on the final lap that left her with a fractured rib and a concussion. Despite the crash, Benassi still finished the race, but it turned out to be the start of something worse. While hundreds of athletes from the US military took part in the games, Maatje Benassi was plucked out of the group and given a starring role in the conspiracy theory.
Watch the story here.
Maatje and her husband, Matt—a retired Air Force officer—have never tested positive for the virus, and have experienced no symptoms. And yet, they have been accused of bringing the virus to Wuhan before it exploded last fall.
The guy who has been leading this smear campaign is longtime YouTube conspiracy peddler George Webb, whom you may know as one of the clowns who falsely claimed two years ago there was a dirty bomb en route to Charleston. In March, he began uploading videos accusing Maatje of being “Patient Zero” in the outbreak. Within days, the comments turned particularly virulent and hateful. Several of Webb’s “fans” have flooded the Benassis with hateful messages on social media, forcing them to delete their Facebook and Twitter accounts. After someone doxed the Benassis by plastering their home address online, they were targeted with nasty letters as well.
In a rambling interview with CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Webb didn’t even begin to offer any extraordinary evidence to support his extraordinary claim. He claimed that there was “a lot of circumstantial evidence” tying her to the outbreak,” based on “a source that I cannot reveal” who said Maatje worked at Fort Belvoir and tested positive there.
But apparently this is good enough for China. Webb’s videos have made their way onto Communist Party-controlled media with Chinese subtitles, with Webb being billed as an “investigative journalist.” Apparently Beijing is using them to deflect blame for the outbreak. Webb’s videos have also turned up on popular Chinese social media platforms WeChat, Weibo and Xingua Video.
The Benassis have filed innumerable complaints with YouTube. However, it can take several days for YouTube to delete them. Additionally, even deleted videos can get re-uploaded.
Webb’s diatribes supposedly fall just inside the boundaries of protected speech, so there’s no way to hold him to account criminally. Even more incredibly, the Benassis believe would be prohibitively expensive to sue Webb for libel. That’s obscene.
One good thing appears to have come out of this. Webb was apparently forced to delete his Twitter account, which at one point had over 57,000 followers, within hours of CNN’s story going live. It looks like he did so on his own; when you try to go to his old handle, @GeorgWebb, you get a screen that says “This account doesn’t exist.” Had Twitter nuked it, it would have said that the account was suspended.
What Webb is doing appears to be textbook evidence that stochastic terrorism really is a thing. And it’s an absolute travesty that the Benassis don’t seem to have any real means of making Webb answer for it. Somebody needs to step up and be willing to take their case. After all, the Benassis are private people, and on paper they can draw blood if they take Webb to court. Surely there’s an attorney out there willing to take this on pro bono.
The easiest way, on paper, to help the Benassis is to get Webb’s YouTube channel deleted. However, when I go to Webb’s “About” page on his channel and click the flag to report him for harassment, it only allows you to report if you’re being harassed personally, not if someone else is. And on the mobile Web and YouTube app, there’s no function for reporting at all. That’s a shame. If we could pressure Twitter into adding one-click/one-tap reporting, YouTube ought to do the same. If Google is really serious about combatting disinformation and harassment, it will do so.
Tuesday, Apr 28, 2020 · 4:45:04 PM +00:00
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Christian Dem in NC
Otteray Scribe notes that Webb has changed the descriptions for his Benassi videos to this:
I am officially retracting my earlier reporting that Maatje Benassi tested positive for CoronaVirus. I realize now I was being fed bad information to entrap me, exactly in the same way an FBI informant was used on my way to Piketon, Ohio three years ago. I am correcting my reporting that she only acted as a NATO Courier for the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO at the Wuhan Games which was my original reporting on this topic.
Weak sauce, George. You’re missing one part—“I apologize to Maatje and her family.”