Alt-Right Twitter Users Create 1,000 Fake 'Black Person' Accounts Promoting Racism

A pro-Donald Trump white supremacist website called the Daily Stormer said it created 1,000 fake Twitter accounts for fictional black people this week to a way to troll the internet and spread racist ideas. The announcement, which came from a blog post from the website’s founder Andrew Anglin, is a response to Twitter’s recent ban on accounts circulating alt-right content, the Guardian reported Thursday.

"Twitter is about to learn what happens when you mess with Republicans," said Anglin in the blog post. Anglin called on his readers to create more fake Twitter profiles, saying that their posts needed to be “indistinguishable” from actual Twitter accounts belonging to black people.

“When you have time, create a fake black person account,” Anglin 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.”

Upon revealing its new "anti-harassment policy" Tuesday, Twitter removed several of the most high profile accounts among right-wing users, including Richard B. Spencer of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think-tank based in Arlington, Virginia, and Pax Dickinson, the former chief technology officer for Business Insider, who was dismissed for offensive and racist Tweets.

Spencer coined the term “alt right” in 2008, the Independent reported Friday. He referred to Twitter’s suspension of his account as “corporate Stalinism” in a YouTube video Wednesday. The alt-right is a largely Internet-based group of people with far-right political beliefs opposing mainstream conservatism in the United States.

Twitter’s new policy prohibits online 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 created a feature with which a user can block tweets that contain certain words from ever reaching them.

The Daily Stormer, which claims to be “America’s #1 Most-Trusted Republican News Source” on the homepage of its website, was named after “the infamous Nazi Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic weekly newspaper, Der Stürmer, which specialized in pornographic attacks on Jews,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights group based in Birmingham, Alabama.

The number of accounts belonging to self-identified neo-Nazis and white nationalists multiplied by more than 600 percent since 2012, according to a study from the George Washington University Program on Extremism titled “Nazis vs. ISIS on Twitter.” That rate is higher than social media accounts used by ISIS supporters, the study said.

There were more than 400 incidents of physical harassment and intimidation since Trump's presidential election victory, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported Tuesday.