Successful prosecutions for online hate speech have to show a prolonged pattern of harassment against an individual, Citron said. “But it gets trickier if you are directing people, or directly inciting people, to engage in a pattern of threatening or harassing an individual.”ĭanielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Virginia and author of two books on online harassment and privacy, said the bar to prosecute somebody for this sort of activity is even higher. “Generally speaking, publishing information that is publicly available about individuals is not, in itself, going to be creating potential legal liability,” Mackey said.
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Though Americans enjoy significant freedom of speech because of the First Amendment, people do not have absolute free reign to use speech that internationally harasses or intimidates others, said Aaron Mackey, free speech and transparency litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was in federal custody at the time Harassment, but is it illegal? More from this report: He pushed harassment 'raids,' sold racist paraphernalia online. Sometime between that inquiry and Monday morning, the Project Mayhem channel disappeared from the site. Telegram did not respond to a request for comment by USA TODAY on Friday. But to direct attacks, that's actually real nasty.” “Harassment usually just arises almost out of the ether because people don't like something somebody's saying, and so they get mobbed online. “What’s so different about this is that it's literally orchestrated,” Beirich said. Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, who has monitored extremist activity since the 1980s, said she has never seen a campaign that was as open, blatant, and targeted as this one. " the channel posted March 30, adding another slur. “Let’s show this f-t what real white boys are like!” reads a post from April 3.Īnother from April 2 spewed the N-word and said the targets would "hang from this theoretical treehouse."
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Channel followers would then flood that person’s online presence with hatred.īut in recent weeks the channel took to fully “doxxing” its targets − providing full names, addresses, phone numbers and emails of people the group wishes to target, as well as photos of them and their family members, including children.Īccording to the calls to action posted by Project Mayhem, most of the targets were chosen because they’re Black or LGBTQ or because they identify with the anti-fascist movement. The channel, which functions similarly to a Twitter account, would post a call to raid someone, usually identified by their social media accounts. What these people all had in common, but didn’t know, was that they had been chosen as targets by a vicious campaign of online “raids” orchestrated by an account run by one of the internet’s most notorious white supremacists, using the secure messaging app Telegram.įor months, a USA TODAY investigation found, the Telegram channel “Project Mayhem” amassed more than 1,500 followers, who assisted in organized “raids” advertised on the channel. All found themselves flooded with racist and homophobic insults, memes, offensive photos and death threats. In recent weeks, attacks like this have repeated across the country: A Jewish university student in New Jersey bombarded with antisemitic messages a trans man in Florida attacked for his identity a Black YouTuber in Kentucky targeted because of his race. People sending, like, monkey emojis and stuff like that − mostly just racist remarks.” “People saying that my ‘day of the rope’ will come. “I was getting photos sent to me of, like white power,” Unieke said. “I already have complex post-traumatic stress disorder, so, logging on to all that hate is just triggering in general.”įurther north, in Sacramento, California, Unieke, a drag queen who appears at a local all-age drag show, was being bombarded in the same way. “It was distressing,” said Nygard, who identifies as agender and uses she/they pronouns. The messages poured in, telling Nygard to kill herself, sending death threats as well as “88,” a white supremacist term that stands for “Heil Hitler.” The business owner from San Diego, who co-founded Restrained Grace, a company that creates and sells jewelry, gifts and fetish gear − and whose online profile uses the term "Antifa" − suddenly started getting dozens of hate-filled direct messages on social media. Caution: This story refers to racist and homophobic language.Īnnie Nygard didn’t know what was happening.
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