Hate groupsAlt-right racists to flood Twitter with “fake black people” posts
White supremacists associated with the alt-right movement said they were planning to retaliate against Twitter by inundating it with postings from fake accounts pretending to be black people. The alt-right extremists said the retaliation is in response to Twitter’s banning several accounts belonging to individuals and groups associated with the racist and anti-Semitic movement. Alt-right figure Andrew Anglin of the neo-Nazi Web site Daily Stormer instructed his followers: “When you have time, create a fake black person account,” he wrote. “Just go on black Twitter and see what they look like, copy that model. Start filling it with rap videos and booty-shaking or whatever else these blacks post.”
White supremacists associated with the alt-right movement said they were planning to retaliate against Twitter by inundating it with postings from fake accounts pretending to be black people. The alt-right extremists said the retaliation is in response to Twitter’s banning several accounts belonging to individuals and groups associated with the racist alt-right movement.
Twitter earlier this week unveiled a new anti-harassment policy this week. The announcement was followed with the suspension of several high profile accounts associated with white supremacists and anti-Semites involved in the alt-right movement. Among the deleted accounts suspended was that of Richard Spencer, who is credited with coining the term alt-right in 2008. Spencer, and his white supremacist National Policy Institute think tank (“Twitter suspends accounts of alt-right individuals, organizations,” HSNW, 17 November 2016).
Endgadget reports that white supremacists groups and other alt-right extremists celebrated Donald Trump’s election victory. Trump campaign CEO, Steve Bannon – who will be the new president’s strategist adviser – is major alt-right figure and publisher of its main media organ, Breitbart News. Bannon, accused in court proceedings of being an anti-Semite, proudly declared Breitbart as the “platform for the alt-right.”
Alt-right figure Andrew Anglin of the neo-Nazi Web site Daily Stormer, called on visitors to his Web site to create fake accounts on Twitter.
“When you have time, create a fake black person account,” he wrote. “Just go on black Twitter and see what they look like, copy that model,” the post reads. “Start filling it with rap videos and booty-shaking or whatever else these blacks post. Read through their posts to get an idea of how they post. You need to be able to post in a manner which is indistinguishable from normal black tweeters. …Twitter is about to learn what happens when you mess with Republicans.”
According to the post, there are about 1,000 alt-right-inspired fake accounts already in existence.
At the end of the blog post, published on Wednesday, The Daily Stormer says, “the meme wars have only just begun,” before outlining the next steps in a coordinated harassment campaign that targets people in the real world, rather than online. The call to action begins as follows:
“We will introduce new ways of trolling, including IRL trolling, snailmail trolling, telephone trolling, hoaxes, shoe company endorsements, etc. And look. We’re not done with Twitter. We’ve got a big campaign coming up.”
At-right followers have already been harassing “people in the real world.” The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Task Force on Harassment and Journalism last month released a report detailing a troubling, year-long rise in anti-Semitic hate targeting journalists on Twitter, with data showing that the harassment has been driven by rhetoric in the 2016 presidential campaign and identifying some of the groups and individuals responsible. The report found that out of a total of 2.6 million tweets, which containined language frequently found in anti-Semitic speech, between August 2015 and July 2016, a total of 19,253 anti-Semitic tweets were directed at journalists. These journalists were pereceived by alt-right Trump supporters to be both Jewish and critical of Trump. The report shows that more than two-thirds (68 percent) of the anti-Semitic tweets directed at those journalists were sent by 1,600 Twitter accounts (out of 313 million existing Twitter accounts). The words that appear most frequently in the 1,600 Twitter attackers’ bios are “Trump,” “nationalist,” “conservative,” and “white” (see “Widespread anti-Semitic harassment of journalists perceived as critical of Donald Trump: Report,” HSNW, 19 October 2016).
Endgadget notes that Twitter’s move on Tuesday followed years of criticism that the company was dragging its feet in addressing hate speech or harassment. The criticism intensified in the wake of Gamergate and the racist attacks on comedian Leslie Jones.
Twitter’s new policy prohibits attacks or threats “on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease.”
The company also introduced a new mute future which allows users to block tweets with words they find offensive.
Social media platforms Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan have been instrumental in the growth of extremist hate groups like the alt-right white supremacist movement and terrorist organizations like ISIS.
A recent study from the George Washington University Program on Extremism found that the number of accounts belonging to self-identified neo-Nazis and white nationalists multiplied by more than 600 percent since 2012 – a rate higher than accounts belonging to ISIS sympathizers (see “White Nationalist groups growing much faster than ISIS on Twitter,” HSNW, 6 September 2016).
The study says: “Today, [white nationalist Twitter accounts] outperform ISIS in nearly every social metric, from follower counts to tweets per day.”
