Russians Posing as Black Activists on Facebook Is More Than Fake News

This past summer, a Facebook account called Blacktivist posted a horrifying video. It depicted a black man handcuffed, his face planted to the concrete as a canine bit into his arm. “We live under a system of racism,” the post read, “and police are letting us know how they feel and where we stand.” We live in times of resistance, and the growing authority of social media has directly impacted the shape of activism. With that action increasingly moving online, recent revelations offer insight into just how critically the tide of control has shifted.

In late September, CNN reported on a Kremlin-supported plot to invade the online communities of the Black Lives Matter movement, the global network of civil rights organizations and justice-oriented nonprofits launched in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s 2012 death. The pro-Kremlin Russian firm Internet Research Agency had fabricated hundreds of accounts and bought $100,000 in ads during a two-year period; of the 470 groups it created to “exploit tensions” in U.S. elections, Blacktivist had become one its most accessible, signing on more than 500,000 followers and well outpacing the official Black Lives Matters account. That number bears little shock; it's simply a striking indicator of the movement’s unmistakable draw and necessity.

Time and again, urgent social and political crusades have attracted noxious efforts to infiltrate and dismantle them. The deeper reasons behind such a ploy are as unsurprising as they are obvious: black liberation movements have faced a constant and public threat from outside detractors since the 1950s, when the push for civil rights hit a national breaking point.

Under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s counterintelligence program—known as COINTELPRO—sought to disrupt supposed radical organizations such as the Black Panther Party, the SCLC, and the Young Lords. The bureau sent anonymous letters that threatened exposure, planted unfounded media stories, arrested members under false pretenses, and coordinated a barrage of illegal break-ins despite proof of unlawfulness. Most famously, the Chicago police department, with the help of the FBI, raided the home of local Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, which resulted in the 21-year-old’s death.

Even now, infiltration remains a constant. White supremacists of today masquerade as kinfolk in digital town squares like Black Twitter, their sock-puppet accounts taking on handles like @c00ntown and @boojiiplaya832, a parade of ridiculous signifiers. (A @blacktivists account, now suspended, first appeared on Twitter in April of last year). In 2016, Andrew Anglin set out a blueprint on The Daily Stormer, the neo-Nazi site he founded. “How to be a Nigger on Twitter” outlined vicious, laughably simplistic guidelines for cultural assimilations, linking black identity to qualifiers like “large female buttocks,” combative behavior, “expensive Nike tennis shoes,” and a lack of punctuation in tweets. “Chaos is the name of the game,” Anglin wrote.

For followers of Blacktivist, the appeal of the account was understandable. It took on the veneer of a real entity, posting videos about police brutality, promoting rallies, reaching out to users via Facebook Messenger, and selling merchandise with slogans like “Our Sons Matter” and “Young, Gifted, and Black.” As the entrance to social activism has become that much more attuned to the innovations of contemporary life, people are eager to align their beliefs with those in similar fights, and public Facebook accounts and groups serve as communal nerve centers, where information is disseminated and organizing is as swift as the click of your mouse. But because the barrier to entry requires little, the risk of intrusion heightens dangerously.

Indeed, the Blacktivist case is all the more fascinating for where it sowed discord: not within, but without. Spread across its web of sham accounts, Internet Research Agency targeted issues that had become fiery, schismatic national talking points during the presidential election and have remained so at dinner tables across America. Gun control. Race relations. Gay rights. (In November, Facebook and Twitter will testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee in a hearing about Russian interference in the 2016 election.)

Facebook, for all its connectivity and purported good will, allows users a facade of engagement. We only opt in if we choose to. This is what makes Blacktivist such an interesting phenomenon: its popularity suggests that our social tools—and the import we draw from them—have not superseded the messages we spout on a given platform, nor vice versa. Think of Tahrir Square, of Ferguson and of Charlottesville. These realities, and the tools we utilize, live in accordance, one just as important to the vitality of the other.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal about the Blacktivist account, a pastor and Baltimore activist named Heber Brown III said there was always a “possibility that less-than-friendly actors would look for ways to align with the movement.” Yet, the Russian accounts didn’t weaken activist movements. These weren’t apparatuses of an oppressive federal watchdog or bilious hate group, bent on undermining any agenda that ran counter to their own. Rather, by strengthening the resolve of various communities with competing interests, they sought to throw all of the ideological continuum into chaos, setting the stage for a opportunistic candidate like Donald Trump.

But their success may have unintended consequences, too. In allegedly helping elect a president who sympathizes with white supremacists—or at the very least has done nothing to sway their allegiance to him—they seemed only to amplify the same concerns of the people Trump has done his best to quell. And in that, they may have further empowered black activism beyond what even a president can quash.

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