The Age of Misinformation: How (and Why) a 9-Year-Old Troll Bait Article of Mine Got Posted By Elon Musk

"It may be a lie, but the fact I believed it speaks volumes about my enemies, and not me."

If you’re reading this, then you may or may not already know who I am. I’ve already written extensively about myself on Medium, most notably in the articles “First Public Statement From Joshua Goldberg” (2019), “I Am Michael Slay: The Incredibly Strange, Incredibly True Story of How Someone With the Last Name Goldberg Became a Writer on the Most Popular Neo-Nazi Website” (2022), “How Prison Made Me Hate the Police” (2024), and “If You’re Aspie and You Know It, Flap Your Hands” (written in 2016, published in 2024). To make a very long story short, I was, from age 11 onwards, the most prolific internet troll in history, with a dizzying array of fake online identities, until I was arrested in 2015 for posing as a jihadist in a ham-handed attempt to infiltrate online jihadists in the hopes of eventually becoming a journalist (or FBI agent).

I’m not going to go into much detail about the incidents leading up to my arrest in this article, because it isn’t relevant in this particular case. What inspired me to finally create a Substack and write this article was seeing a blatantly obvious troll bait editorial that I wrote in 2015 get posted on Twitter by none other than Elon Musk:

The article is titled “Yes, Diversity Is About Getting Rid Of White People (And That’s A Good Thing)”, and it was supposedly written by “Emily Goldstein” (one person in the original comments speculated that this was a play on Emmanuel Goldstein, the totalitarian state’s invented “Enemy of the People” from 1984, but I actually just went with a random female first name and a blatantly Jewish-sounding last name). At first glance, anyone with a functioning brain could tell that this article from “Goldstein” is blatantly obvious rage bait along the lines of the similar fake Thought Catalog writer “Anne Gus” (who was, in reality, a Swedish troll from the bodybuilding.com forums who thought that it would be amusing to crudely caricature a Tumblr feminist and get rage clicks for writing over-the-top bait articles like one calling for the genocide of all short men). The “Emily Goldstein” article is just as obvious in its true intentions as those written by the gym bro who penned articles as “Anne Gus”. Here’s an excerpt of “Goldstein”’s writing:

Whites should also know that, when they do become a minority in formerly white countries, they will NOT be receiving affirmative action or any of the other benefits meant to assist the minorities that whites have historically oppressed. Why? Because whites don’t deserve those benefits. It’s as simple as that. One can look to South Africa, where whites are only about 8.4% of the population, but blacks continue to receive affirmative action because blacks in South Africa have historically been disenfranchised by whites. The same thing will happen when whites become a minority in North America, Europe, and Oceania, because whites have historically oppressed minorities in all three of those continents. Not to mention, why should whites receive any kind of benefits when the ultimate goal is to get rid of whites altogether? Finally, laws against hate speech will serve to prevent whites from complaining about this, as any white person who complains will be arrested, given a long prison sentence, and made an example of for the rest of the remaining white population. Speech that attempts to justify the white power structure and perpetuate white oppression of minorities is not freedom of speech, and it has absolutely no place in modern society.

This is, it goes without saying, even more blatant trolling than the fake neo-Nazi articles that I penned as “Michael Slay”, but, when I initially wrote the vitriolic “Goldstein” article, I assumed that the alt-right would be stupid enough to fall for it. And, oh, boy, was I right. My publisher at the time - Daniel Hayes, who wrote an article about me after my arrest - initially didn’t want to publish the “Emily Goldstein” article. He thought that it was just too much, even for the site that published “Anne Gus”’s call for a manlet Holocaust (Thought Catalog, at the time, was well-known for being a site that would publish just about anything). After my arrest, Hayes told me that he “hemmed and hawed” about the article to his superior, but was told that there was no reason for him not to publish it. Hayes finally published the article only when I found a relevant real-life event to tie it to: the case of Bahar Mustafa, who I had previously written an embarrassingly bad article about as myself (this particular article very much made me come across like a right-wing reactionary, which I am most assuredly not). Hayes changed only one part of the “Emily Goldstein” article from my original draft. One sentence originally read: “As a descendant of Holocaust survivors, I can personally attest to the evil that white people are capable of when they hold the reins of power.” Hayes, feeling that it would be too distasteful to claim to be a descendant of Holocaust survivors in a fake troll article, changed it to this: “Descendants of Holocaust survivors can personally attest to the evil that white people are capable of when they hold the reins of power.” Otherwise, however, the article remained completely intact as I originally wrote it.

As soon as the article was published, I posted it on Stormfront (under my “WakeUpWhiteMan” account) and on Reddit’s white supremacist cesspools (under my “European88” account). The article was instantly flooded with the predictable impotent rage from the 1488 crowd, and Hayes privately expressed displeasure with me for bringing so many white supremacists to Thought Catalog. I considered the article to be a highly successful troll bait piece, having done exactly what it set out to do: piss off idiots. Much like with my “Michael Slay” pieces and my ridiculously over-the-top pro-genocide piece on The Times of Israel (a publication that I had previously trolled as “Dinah Silverstein”), my intentions with the “Emily Goldstein” piece were purely to serve as a nihilistic chaos agent, and things went exactly according to plan. The article became one of only two Thought Catalog pieces ever - the other being Gavin McInnes’s notorious piece “Transphobia Is Perfectly Natural” - to be reported so much that it was actually hidden behind a warning page.

In my 2019 “First Public Statement From Joshua Goldberg”, I mentioned the “Emily Goldstein” piece only briefly in one paragraph:

If there was ever a major firestorm on the internet, you can rest assured that I played some role in it. For example, remember that “Yes, Diversity is About Getting Rid of White People (and That’s a Good Thing)” article by “Emily Goldstein”? That was me (I assumed that the alt-right would be stupid enough to fall for it, and I assumed correctly). Remember #EndFathersDay? That was mostly my handiwork as well. There are countless more examples. Make no mistake about it: I was, without a doubt, the most prolific and successful troll in the history of the internet. But, much like being a persona factory, is being the world’s greatest troll really something that anyone should strive for? Is “KING OF TROLLS” really something that anyone should want on their tombstone? No, of course not. In the end, I accomplished absolutely nothing other than landing myself in federal prison.

While I figured at the time that the article was still making the rounds on online alt-right echo chambers, what I had not anticipated was that, after my release from prison earlier this year, the article would suddenly explode in popularity again, with far-right influencers across social media sharing it for rage clicks, despite me having previously admitted to being the author of it. Ultimately, that fact is not even relevant to the people sharing the article. In his piece about trolling community rDrama.net (which I was made an administrator on after my release from prison) - “How One Tight-Knit Circle of Internet Troublemakers Convinced Professional Journalists They Were ‘Abortion Bounty Hunters’” - Tracing Woodgrains includes a time-honored tweet by a user going by the screen name Hbomberguy:

Tracing Woodgrains then makes the world-weary (and undeniably true) observation:

That about sums up, I think, why bait like this is so successful right now. People want these stories to be true. The culture war is heating up, and people on all sides desperately want to believe their enemies really are as bad as the worst caricatures of them. None of these stories were hard to fact-check. In almost every thread about them, at least a few lonely voices stood around reminding everyone that the obvious bait was, in fact, obvious bait, often with links to the origins. Anyone who wanted to do due diligence could.

Do I think for a second that Elon Musk actually believes that “Emily Goldstein” is a real person who really, sincerely called for the genocide of all white people in earnest? No, of course not. Elon Musk may have fried his brain with ketamine, but he is certainly not stupid. He knows very well that the article is fake rage bait. But he simply doesn’t care. In the post-truth era ushered in by Donald Trump, the veracity of the article is completely irrelevant - all that matters is that it will generate angry clicks and further the political hyperpolarization that has turned nearly all websites into putrid partisan propaganda outlets.

I was born in 1995 (which is often cited as the first year of generation Z), so I am just barely old enough to remember a different internet - one where sites like Twitter were essentially the wild west, where the principles of the First Amendment were king. Twitter, from 2006 to 2016, was one of the most unregulated, anything-goes spaces on the web, and it hosted as many users on the far-left as it did users on the far-right. It was essentially a site where anyone could say anything, no matter who they were or what they believed. That ended in 2016, when, at the behest of so-called “progressives” and “human rights activists”, Twitter began aggressively cracking down on “hate speech” and “misinformation” and, as such, the site effectively turned itself into a leftist echo chamber (of the neoliberal, idpol-worshiping variety). When Elon Musk purchased the site in 2022, he promised to return it to its former status as an open square, but significant pressure from the profoundly Orwellian international “human rights” lobby (and governments like the European Union and Brazil) ensured that it would remain censored, and what Elon has essentially done is simply do the inverse of what its previous owners had done; rather than censoring speech in the service of maintaining a left-wing circlejerk, Elon Musk’s administration censors speech in the service of maintaining a right-wing circlejerk. “Hate speech” and “misinformation” are still censored, of course, but what Elon Musk defines as “hate speech” and “misinformation” is, needless to say, very different from what Twitter’s previous owners did. The same scenario is currently playing out in Europe, as far-right parties begin to take power and use the “hate speech” and other speech censorship laws zealously pushed by useful idiot leftists and “human rights activists” in order to silence opponents of the far-right. People who advocate drawing lines around freedom of speech always envision themselves as the one holding the pen. They never even entertain the thought that someone else’s definition of objectionable speech might differ from theirs.

My own Twitter account was banned quite recently. No reason was ever given for the permanent suspension, but I can only assume that it was for making jokes about shoving pedophiles into woodchippers, as those were my last posts before my suspension. However, in the few months that I had used Twitter after my release from prison, I had noticed a significant change in the site that echoes the hyperpolarization that occurred in the rest of the country (and, by extension, the rest of the world) during the Trump administration. No longer was Twitter the wild west, where all opinions were heard; now, the site’s users were far more concerned with keeping themselves in a bubble, portraying their opponents as straw boogeyman and using rage bait articles like my old “Emily Goldstein” piece as validation for their worldviews. I myself bear some responsibility for helping to create this atmosphere of hyperpartisan polarization, as Jim Treacher described in his Daily Caller article “Joshua Goldberg: Worst Troll Ever?”, published four days after my arrest in 2015:

Goldberg became very adept at creating various online personae, setting them up against each other, and getting people to take sides. He’d find a polarizing topic, he’d take extreme but seemingly sincere positions on both sides using different names, and then he’d sit back with his bag of Cheetos and watch the chaos unfold. He set Jews and Muslims against each other, feminists vs. videogame nerds, Nazis vs. everybody. It was all like a game, until suddenly it wasn’t.

When the popular Twitter account Reddit Lies previously posted my “Emily Goldstein” article, it was celebrated on rDrama, but Reddit Lies removed his post when I sent him a DM explaining how he had posted my old troll bait. Elon posting the same article, it goes without saying, has been making even bigger waves on rDrama. Elon, however, is very unlikely to ever remove the post, even if it is explained to him in detail how spurious the article is and how him posting it is simply him making a complete and total fool of himself (which is certainly nothing new to him, of course).

On rDrama and on the radical centrist podcast The Grillcast (which did an extended interview of me a few months ago), hyperpartisans are referred to as “wingcucks” - people who filter absolutely everything through their personal blind and tendentious political dichotomy and adamantly refuse to acknowledge anything that even slightly runs counter to the stringent right-wing or left-wing narrative that they have cemented in their minds. My “Emily Goldstein” piece - like many of my online writings in the years leading up to my arrest - was designed to be wingcuck bait of the highest magnitude, and the fact that it is still being circulated enough to get posted by the wealthiest person in the world serves as a depressing reminder that many people will choose to believe literally anything that serves their political worldview, even if said thing has been proven to be false time and time again. Just ask Donald Trump.

Online right-wing lynch mobs are now targeting a ProPublica writer whose name is Emily Goldstein, accusing her of being behind the 2015 Thought Catalog article, and ProPublica has been forced to issue a statement regarding it. To those lynch mobs, I proudly proclaim: come at me, bro. Don’t direct your bilious invective at a completely innocent woman. I wrote that article to piss you off and, if you’re pissed off about it, then you can send your hate mail directly to me. But, having served 9 years in prison with neo-Nazi gang-bangers and having gotten into real-life physical altercations with them on numerous occasions, I can assure you that I am most definitely not intimidated in the least by basement-dwelling neckbeards hurling pitiful billingsgate at me from behind a computer screen. Do your worst, but I will continue laughing at you, just like I am laughing at Elon Musk and everyone else who continues to disseminate my years-old bullshit.

UPDATE: Elon Musk’s tweet posting my “Emily Goldstein” article has now been double community noted (because one community note apparently wasn’t enough for this level of stupidity).

Don’t expect Elon to ever remove the tweet, however. In fact, a far more likely scenario is him making it impossible to community note any of his posts, if not outright getting rid of community notes altogether.