The Emergence of the White Troll Behind a Black Face
At LGF we’ve discussed “Fake Black” trolling a few times in the past but it is becoming more prevalent as disgruntled white supremacists deploy a new tool for trolling. Here’s a story about more of it, and my reminder that impersonating someone else is against most social media policies, if you see it for certain, report it because it’s not trolling, it’s hate.
“I’m used to trolling, and it doesn’t bother me, but the idea of a black woman selling her sons out to police with everything we know now was so sad to me that I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. And the idea that anyone — let alone a black person — could say Emmett Till deserved to die is just so beyond the pale,” he said.
Over the past few months, Black Twitter has noticed an increase in the number of white trolls creating fake Twitter accounts. Newkirk says he first noticed this around election time last year, when people began posting directions on how to create these fake accounts on websites and forums.
“I don’t have a foolproof method beyond some of the usual troll identification stuff,” Newkirk says. He usually checks the number of tweets and followers on the account, how long ago the account was created, and the types of tweets on the timeline. “The thing that has tipped me off most is they often try to speak the way maybe someone who has never been engaged with black culture thinks black people talk. It’s all very cartoonish.”One such post is an article on white supremacist website, The Daily Stormer. “How to be a Ni**** on Twitter” breaks down methods for creating a fake account in order to take “revenge on Twitter” for banning Andrew Auernheimer’s white supremacist ads and for blocking Jared Wyand’s account for anti-Semitic tweets. The secondary goal, the article notes, is to “create a state of chaos on twitter, among the black twitter population, by sowing distrust and suspicion, causing blacks to panic.”
Also noteworthy is this reason why Google needs to improve their image search algorithm: “take images off Google and flip them to avoid reverse-image searches”
More: The Emergence Of The White Troll Behind A Black Face : Code Switch : NPR