Tech employees can be awful, but they’re rarely dumb enough to be awful when cameras are running. So today, when a video surfaced of a supposed Google employee taunting anti-gentrification protesters in San Francisco – telling one protester, “Why don’t you go to a city that can afford it? This is a city for the right people who can afford it. You can’t afford it? You can leave. I’m sorry, get a better job” — some of us questioned the veracity of the protester’s identity.
Several minutes later, after Twitter had been whipped into a collective rage, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which had originally identified the man in the video as a Google employee, changed its story, saying instead that the man had been a “union organizer” impersonating a Google employee.
The paper ID’d the false-flagger as Max Bell Alper, an Oakland-based activist who had previously helped in shutting down a Wells Fargo building as part of the Occupy movement.
So, there you have it. Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet, kids. (This site excepted.)
