The Emergence Of The White Troll Behind A Black Face
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But he began to pay attention when an account bearing an image of a black woman mentioned she would be okay with her son being subject to police brutality if he misbehaved, and when another account with a picture of a black person said Emmett Till deserved to die.
"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.
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."
Some of the steps to creating a fake account include pretending to know people they might be related to, calling people out on their drug dealing activities, and accusing them of being Neo-Nazis using fake accounts. This way, Aglin writes, "Blacks will then accuse each other of having fake accounts and start reporting each other."
This infiltration can, at times, be successful, according to Whitney Phillip, a professor at Mercer University who describes herself as a digital media folklorist. "No group is universal. No group behavior is uniform. There's always variation within a group and the trolls that are hardest to distinguish as trolls are the ones that kind of play up those factions," she says. The ultimate intention, Phillips says, is to create "discord and confusion and essentially make people of color look bad. That's what a lot of the behaviors are designed to do."
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