SILVER SPRING, Md.—John Damskey’s nightmare began with his wife getting emails from strangers telling her she should be ashamed of her husband, a retired police officer. Their phones wouldn’t stop ringing with calls from unfamiliar numbers. Some even called his 74-year-old mother.
Baffled by the barrage of hate on June 4, Damskey plugged his name into the internet and made a horrifying discovery: Mobs of Twitter users were falsely accusing him of being the bicyclist on a Maryland trail who accosted three young adults posting flyers protesting the death of George Floyd.
