Finance bros spread misinformation after Bondi attacks

Barrie was also on the tools, retweeting overseas accounts, including one that claimed “two dozen people had been stabbed” (which, of course, turned out to be wrong), while posting that the incident “certainly looked like a terrorist attack”.

After the police commissioner said there were no indications it was terror related, Barrie chirped in with “horse shit”. When one user asked, “are you drinking?” he shot back, “Dude”.

Barrie told us his tweets questioning why the police ruled out terrorism in the hours after the attack were because “they didn’t interview the guy, because he was dead”. He said he was being fed information from a friend’s daughter who was at the shopping centre.

Shamgar said he was “quite emotional” because he’s from Sydney’s eastern suburbs, and he also had friends feeding him information from the scene. He said he was told the attacker was “an Arab Muslim”, which led to his tweets.

Extremist Twitter and Telegram accounts, especially those dwelling in overseas basements, have long swarmed tragic events with inflammatory and incorrect information that always make matters worse.

Seriously, do we really need a fund manager and an ASX-listed executive chairman to be part of this problem?

The fact that the attacker eventually was identified as a mentally ill Queensland man, and not, you know, a brown person or migrant, should cause them brief pause in the future.

It probably won’t, of course. To his credit, Shamgar deleted his tweets about importing Palestinian terrorists. “I was wrong,” he said.

Being too online does weird things, pushing people down rabbit holes and into bubbles. Last month, fundie royalty Geoff Wilson joined X (Twitter) as some sort of late-career epiphany about social media. He currently follows only 136 accounts, including a Charlie Munger fan page, venture capitalist Bryan Johnson, a long-life freak, and Andrew Tate, the Romanian accused rapist and sex trafficker. Wilson’s journey through the madness has begun.