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Twitter Still Has A White Nationalist Problem

Twitter Still Has A White Nationalist Problem

Almost 18 months after Twitter promised to crack down on hate, the platform teems with racist extremists.
By Luke O’Brien

Ivylise Simones/HuffPost

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Last month, Twitter put up another blog post declaring that it had made “strides” to build a “healthier” service. Fewer bots, less spam, proactive policing of abuse. It sounded, again, like progress.

Then Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, appeared at TED2019 in Vancouver, Canada, to talk about the “health of the conversation” on his platform. Dorsey, who still commands puffy profiles in The New York Times, often resorts to meaningless jargon when confronted with actual questions. In Vancouver, he threw around terms like “shared reality” and “variety of perspective.” He talked about watching “measurements trend over time.” Eventually, the TED moderator, Chris Anderson, cut him off.



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“Jack, just picking up on some of the questions flooding in,” Anderson said. “A lot of people [are] puzzled why, like, how hard is it to get rid of Nazis from Twitter?”

Dorsey, who became a billionaire by monetizing outrage online, laughed uncomfortably. Again with the Nazis? Dorsey has never had a good answer to this question. He still doesn’t.

“We have policies around violent and extremist groups,” he told the audience in Vancouver. “And the majority of our work and our terms of service works on conduct, not content. So we’re actually looking for conduct. So conduct being using the service to periodically or episodically to harass someone, using hateful imagery that might be associated with the KKK or the American Nazi Party. Those are all things that we act on immediately.”

If those policies worked, the alt-right podcast king Mike “Enoch” Peinovich would not have been on Twitter this month mocking a new memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to African American victims of white supremacy. Peinovich would not be on Twitter advertising a neo-Nazi podcast on which he disparages the memorial as a “dumb monument that’s meant to be an assault on the white people of this country [because] nobody cares about black people... Kikes gave money to build this piece of trash.” He would not be on Twitter inspiring one of his white nationalist followers to tweet a photo of flames consuming the memorial with the message: “Shame to let that nice wood go to waste … Metaphorically speaking” ― a reference to the rash of arsons around the country targeting mosques, black churches and social justice centers.

We underestimated the level of bad actors that we would see and the level of impact they would have. Ev Williams, Twitter co-founder

The white supremacist accused of murdering 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March was also on Twitter, where he spread Islamophobia, white supremacist propaganda and articles about terrorist attacks. He tweeted pictures of his weapons and posted links to a disturbing manifesto he wrote, apparently in anticipation of the deadly rampage. Only after he was charged in a mass murder did Twitter act.

The shooter may have carried out the genocidal end goal of white supremacy, but there are thousands of white supremacists on Twitter with the same mindset, most of them anonymous and working in concert. In a 2018 study, extremism expert J.M. Berger offered an “extremely conservative” estimate that at least 100,000 alt-right users are on Twitter. The repercussions for these bad actors are practically nonexistent.

“We just didn’t invest enough,” Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, who also became a billionaire by monetizing outrage online, told CNN Business this week. “We underestimated the level of bad actors that we would see and the level of impact they would have.”

Take the anonymous alt-right troll called “Spicci,” who leads a harassment gang on Twitter called The Shed and has appeared on white nationalist podcasts to wish death on journalists. For years, Twitter has allowed him to run multiple fake accounts and use the service to menace people and tweet racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic content. Although Spicci has been reported countless times, Twitter typically does nothing. When the company does suspend him, he returns within minutes and continues harassing people. But the process of evaluating his “conduct” starts anew.

Norman “Trey” Garrison of Texas, a failed journalist turned white nationalist podcaster who goes by “Spectre” online, has similarly cycled through dozens of accounts and easily sidestepped Twitter suspensions so he can harass and threaten people. Twitter lets Amy Mekelburg, a notorious Islamophobe endorsed by President Donald Trump and followed by several members of his administration, stay on the platform to blast hate about “Muslim invaders” that is all too similar to some of the language in the Christchurch suspect’s manifesto. Mike Cernovich, a far-right propagandist, rape apologist and conspiracy theorist who collaborates with white nationalists, uses Twitter to smear people as pedophiles. But Cernovich, who has been praised by Donald Trump Jr., is still on the platform as well, even after a man deluded by the “Pizzagate” disinformation campaign Cernovich spread stormed a restaurant with an AR-15 and fired off some shots.

Andrew Kelly/Reuters Far-right propagandist Mike Cernovich uses Twitter to slander people, drive disinformation campaigns and advertise himself.

He played a key role in pushing pro-Trump messaging during the 2016 campaign.

Indeed, many far-right extremists are enjoying an unbroken run of hideous behavior on Twitter that stretches back to at least the start of the Gamergate harassment campaign in 2014. They join in pro-Trump Kremlin-linked disinformation operations such as Pizzagate, the Seth Rich conspiracy and QAnon. They use Twitter in an effort to incite racist violence ― for example, by falsely blaming the recent Notre Dame cathedral fire on Muslims. And they use it to celebrate their terrorist attacks, such as the one in Christchurch.

“These same exact social media tools, whether used to recruit or propagate ideology or promote acts of terrorism, are the same tools that we saw being used by ISIS and foreign terrorist organizations,” Mary McCord, who oversaw terrorism prosecutions at the Department of Justice from 2014 to 2017 and is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said at a recent event at the New America think tank in Washington.

In 2018, every one of the 50 extremist killings in the United States tracked by the Anti-Defamation League was committed by a perpetrator with ties to a right-wing extremist group. White supremacists were responsible for 78% of them. The rising number of “lone wolf” attacks ― such as the ones at synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, California, as well as murders in recent years carried out by terrorists such as church shooter Dylann Roof ― show that the online radicalization process for these homegrown extremists is frighteningly similar to that of ISIS, which relied heavily on Twitter to advance its bloody agenda.

In 2015, for example, 23,880 ISIS accounts generated around 17.4 million tweets, according to an analysis by a group of computer scientists at Texas A&M University and the University of Southern California. That comes out to 730 annual tweets per ISIS account.

White nationalist accounts are far more prolific. A team of data scientists called ”Susan Bourbaki Anthony” looked at a smaller dataset of 44 white nationalist accounts from May 1, 2017, to April 30, 2018, and found that the accounts posted at least 173,426 tweets during that period. That’s 3,942 annual tweets per white nationalist account ― more than five times the rate of the ISIS accounts. Yet Twitter executives have done far less about white supremacy.

Toward the end of April, it became clear why, as Dorsey slouched into the Oval Office to meet his most controversial customer.

SIPA USA/PA Images President Donald Trump is the abuser-in-chief on Twitter.

President Trump routinely violates Twitter policies against abuse and harassment, uses the service to whip up his racist followers and retweets white nationalists like Lauren Southern. Twitter permits this behavior out of what it calls, in an Orwellian twist, a concern for the “public interest.”

The president nevertheless used his April meeting with Dorsey ― much as Republicans did in a similar meeting last year ― to complain about how Twitter censors “conservative” voices. (Earlier this month, the Trump administration unveiled an online tool for people to report this supposed censorship ― along with their personal data ― directly to the White House, a move that was hailed by some white nationalists.)

For its part, Twitter cast the Trump-Dorsey summit as focused on ”protecting the health of the public conversation ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections.” On the same day as his White House visit, however, Dorsey called Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) to tell her that he would not take down a misleading tweet by Trump that appeared to incite violence against the Muslim congresswoman and resulted in a flood of death threats against her, many of them on Twitter.

Two days later, Vice’s Motherboard published a story that shed new light on Dorsey’s unwillingness to crack down on Nazis. In the piece, an anonymous employee explained that, though Twitter had done an admirable job algorithmically scrubbing ISIS propaganda from the platform, the company won’t do the same with white supremacist content because the algorithms would flag Republican politicians and their followers. Twitter advertises itself as politically neutral, but the company’s failure to check far-right extremism is in itself a political decision. Large numbers of white nationalists support Trump, according to extremism experts. Those “conservative” voices Trump wants in full throat on social media are often goose-stepping online with the “very fine people” who rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. In May, the administration cited free speech concerns in refusing to sign an international call to action to combat online extremism in the wake of the Christchurch massacre.

“These extremists have manipulated social media to move from the margins to the mainstream,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, at New America this month. “The idea that Facebook and Google and Twitter can hover over the rest of us and that they bear no responsibility is just plain wrong.”

Social media platforms are private companies. They can regulate content and users how they see fit. Earlier this month, Facebook banned several far-right extremists for promoting violence and hate. Among them: conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, neo-Nazi Republican candidate Paul Nehlen and white nationalist British political operative Milo Yiannopoulos, who was so upset that he took to Gab, a social media platform popular with neo-Nazis, to promote civil war in America.

On Twitter, Trump raged about the Facebook bans.

“I am continuing to monitor the censorship of AMERICAN CITIZENS on social media platforms,” he wrote. “This is the United States of America — and we have what’s known as FREEDOM OF SPEECH! We are monitoring and watching, closely!!”

To reinforce his point, Trump retweeted Canadian white nationalist Lauren Southern and British fake news merchant Paul Joseph Watson, one of the extremists banned by Facebook. The First Amendment protects only against government censorship, not decisions made by social media companies ― a distinction seemingly lost on Trump.

TBC