Black Twitter has come up with the best antidote to racist incursions: humor.
On Dec. 9, Andrew Anglin, founder of the Neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, initiated a campaign in a blog post (using racist language) in which he urged fellow white supremacists to cultivate fake black identities on Twitter and “create a state of chaos on twitter, among the black twitter population, by sowing distrust and suspicion.”
The point was to exact ”revenge” after Twitter suspended the accounts of fellow white nationalists, and the hope was to infiltrate, confuse, and agitate Black Twitter. And, Anglin wrote, to “have a lot of fun.”
“This will create a serious problem for twitter, as blacks make up a large percentage of their userbase, and the way they handle it—and they will handle it poorly—will cause a media spectacle,” he wrote. “As a secondary goal, the chaos will effect [sic] the Black Lives Matter movement, which uses twitter as its primary platform. Activists will no longer be able to operate without being constantly suspicious that blacks responding to them are fake accounts.”
But the stunt didn’t play out quite as Anglin hoped. Rather than falling for his tricks or ignoring them, Black Twitter devised its own harmless and hilarious vetting process to weed out the imposters—and had a lot of fun doing it.
Twitter users have been posing questions under the hashtag #BlackTwitterVerificationQuestions, each referencing an inside joke—many of them Black Twitter memes or trending topics, like the guy who drove to Temecula to take on a Kobe Bryant-hater from Twitter, or the one who was exasperated at $200 dates being normal. The point being that white trolls on the racially segregated internet are unlikely to be clued in to these viral sensations.
Twitter user @iHateDanae reportedly created #BlackTwitterVerificationQuestions after she came across Anglin’s inflammatory post. “I saw it as a humorous way of taking ownership of the Twitter experience we have created,” she told the Huffington Post.
Here’s a sampling of the tweets: