Thread by @gwensnyderPHL

(Thread)

Now that folks have had a moment to process that they landed on a Nazi list, I think it might be helpful to talk about best practice for handling these sorts of documents in the public in the future.

Because... (I say it with love) this was a clusterfuck.

Some background on who I am and why I'm in a position to talk about this: I've been in the eye of the public doing antifascist research under my own name for years.

I've been on countless Nazi watch/report/murder lists, weathered A LOT of death threats and mass report attacks.

My research focus for a long time was Telegram, starting back in spring 2019 right before 8chan went down and far right use of the app skyrocketed.

I spent an ungodly amount of time watching and mapping that ecosystem.

The first thing to know: Nazis love making lists of enemies.

Love it.

So, this "antifa list" started as a drop in the ocean of Nazi lists, on a channel with under 800 followers.

Another thing about this list: it's poorly constructed and huge.

They just scraped the "following" lists from a few targeted antifascist accounts, including mine, no vetting.

These weren't specialized lists we made, even. It's just people we follow.

That's why you're seeing accounts of cemetery historians, ADHD coaches, parenting influencers, low level Philly city hall stuff, alongside explicitly political accounts.

Those are my *other* interests.

It's also why you see explicitly fash accounts like LibsofTikTok there.

When they scraped our follows, they didn't even filter out the fascists we were tracking, or very obvious fun follows of celebrities (hi, Cardi B).

So again, VERY low quality list.

A huge, very low quality list on a very low follower channel.

And you have to understand, mass reporting is a GRIND.

It's so much easier to share a list than it is to get people to go through that list and troll its members, especially if the list count is over 15.

Let me repeat that: it is very difficult to get people mass reporting a list of over 15 accounts or so.

Not over 1500. Over 15.

This list is 5000 people long.

That's why Nazi mass report channels on Telegram don't usually do lists.

They either share a target's tweet for a mass report, or make a short list that they convert into a graphic (sometimes with crosshairs charmingly included over our faces).

Nazi channels typically don't do target lists longer than 10 or 15 people for mass report or death threat/harassment, because it *doesn't work.*

And I can confirm this from the other side-- I've successfully run mass report campaigns against Nazi accounts, same experience.

It's organizing 101, really.

If you want a casual audience to take an action, you make that action feel accessible and manageable.

Reporting one or five accounts? Accessible and manageable.

Reporting 5000? That is a bad ask from an organizing perspective.

It is overwhelming.

All that to say, this list as-was would not have gone far as a mass report tool.

It would have floated around Telegram channels for a day, the first 10 people on the list would have noticed a bump on harassing replies, MAYBE the first 30, but that's unlikely.

The problem is what happened next.

With the best of intentions, folks monitoring Telegram saw the list and decided to warn its membership.

Which is usually actually best practice in antifascist community. We let each other know.

The key part, though, is that we usually do it PRIVATELY.

Any time one of this lists goes up, any time I turn up on a mass report channel, my DMs light up with more antifascists than harassers.

Because we warn each other.

That is good praxis.

So (again, with the best of intentions) folks watching the channel tried to do that.

Problem was, the list is MASSIVE and full of people outside antifascists' networks, often with closed DMs.

How do you get word out to them?

And remember, these things are time sensitive.

When the small lists happen, targets often get wiped off Twitter within hours. Also in my experience, most threats happen within hours of a targeting post on Telegram.

The urgency is real.

So what some folks did was try and crowdsource that effort, sharing the list and encouraging public tagging of people on it.

Which is an admirable effort to scale antifascist praxis, but unfortunately an unwise one.

I'm oversimplifying a bit here, but basically there are two kinds of troll brigades to worry about: well-organized ones and passively organized ones.

Well-organized troll brigades (The Shed is probably the most infamous) maintain their comms privately, plan out their attacks together, and often are relatively small crews of people, each of whom maintain huge collections of sock accounts to report/harass from.

These are the folks you really have to worry about when a target list goes live on Telegram. Once one of these crews latches onto a list, they will come after people on it for days, weeks, or even fixate on certain members forever as a matter of pride.

They are pitbulls.

The other kind of troll brigade tends to be much less orderly.

These are the folks who see a mass report alert, click through, report/harass and forget.

Devastating if the brigade is massive and the list is short, but also a passing storm that a temporary lock usually fixes.

The thing about a list of 5k is, it's not usually going to hook either type of brigade.

Organized crews focus on a few hated targets with intensive campaigns. And they already have those crosshairs locked.

And 5k is too much work and too overwhelming for passive TG brigades.

This list would NOT have been a successful tool for harassment, had it not ended up screenshotted and amplified here.

I know a lot of people have theories about the logic behind this list, but speaking as someone who has done this a long time: this is amateur hour, not 5d chess.

It's not a confusion op, it looks like the op of a boomer loser who spent an hour using a scraping tool and then posted the resulting data raw.

Folks are right that the goal was to terrorize people, but incorrect about the level of thought that went into creation of that list.

The correct thing to do in a situation like this is to get the list PRIVATELY to TRUSTED, EXPERIENCED antifascist networks to assess danger/source and then PRIVATELY figure out how to alert those at risk.

The impulse to crowdsource alerting wasn't wrong, but the execution here was dangerous, and most dangerous to those on the list.

Here's why: putting a Twitter mass report target list on Twitter is doing their work for them.

What you do when you do this, you create a whole new audience for the list.

There is A REASON we deplatform fascists and relegate them to these little silos like Telegram.

We WANT their lists and propaganda quarantined from mainstream circulation.

Once you put those lists and that propaganda up unedited here, you've effectively communicated that propaganda to a much bigger audience of casual and disorganized trolls, the folks who aren't so committed they'll download Telegram, but will definitely click "report" if asked.

In other words, sharing this content as-is speedily transmits it to the very audience that deplatformer antifascists have worked so hard to cut the hardcore Nazis off from.

And once you start tagging people, it's even worse.

They don't even have to look at the list, they can just click through.

It lowers the barrier to casual trolling even more.

Even worse, it makes it easier for trolls to target accounts from marginalized folks.

Tagging means it only takes one click to see whether an account has a Black face in their avi, or a trans pride emoji in their display name.

In this case, this stuff happened and happened on a massive scale, fast.

Because the list was so huge, A LOT of people found out they were on it at the same time.

Because the list was so poorly vetted, a lot of those people had no experience with being on a list like this.

Because this list heavily features scrapings from antifascists, who typically try to follow a lot of voices from marginalized backgrounds, it disproportionately included queer, nonwhite, and other marginalized people.

AND because the list was so poorly vetted, many of these accounts checked all or some of these boxes PLUS had a high or high-ish follower account.

So a ton of high follower accounts found out, got tagged, got targeted as a result, and amplified the list, tagging friends.

Their own audience counts plus the algorithm gave the list a sudden huge audience, more Nazis on and off Telegram took note and joined in on the fun, and this shitty throwaway list very quickly became the most well-known Nazi target lists ever to hit this website.

Again, all of this was done with I believe the best of intentions.

For the most part, folks just wanted to warn each other (some folks enjoyed the notoriety maybe a bit conterproductively, but also I've been there and that's human).

What really matters right now is, what lessons do we learn and put into practice going forward.

And I would hope they are:

1) DO NOT AMPLIFY UNEDITED NAZI CONTENT.

Frankly, unless you have a lot of experience working with this stuff, I'd advise against EVER amplifying Nazi content (even via screenshot), even with edits. It's too easy to accidentally miss a dog whistle or detail and spread hate.

For example: Telegram is poorly indexed, so much so that there's a running joke with Nazis about FBI agents logging on and saying "hey fellas, where are the good Nazi channels?"

Because word of mouth/dog whistle keywords is how people find channels.

So if you share a screenshot of a channel with the channel name included, you're effectively advertising a Nazi channel to Twitter Nazis who might never have found it otherwise. So we black them out unless we're specifically asking folks to report that channel.

How would you know that if you didn't study this stuff?

You wouldn't!

So unless you do, think twice about sharing Nazi stuff, even if you THINK you've edited it well.

LESSON #2: WE DON'T SHARE NAZI HIT LISTS PUBLICLY

This is really an extension of lesson #1, but it's worth saying specifically.

I would even go so far as to say don't TALK publicly about someone being on a list w/o their permission (or unless they're talking about it already).

LESSON #3: NOT ALL NAZI HIT LISTS ARE THE SAME RISK LEVEL

Some lists are absolutely all-hands-on-deck lists.

Some are internet detritus that only 3 people will ever open.

You need experienced antifascists to vet the list and its source before going to high alert.

This is a judgment call thing, there are no hard and fast rules.

Generally, a long (anything over 20, I'd say) list is less of a threat than longer lists. A list of thousands is usually pretty low risk.

A list on a small TG channel making rounds anemically is low risk.

This is specifically for antifascists doing this work: the best way to vet a list's impact is to privately check troll presence in the replies/mentions of the first ten names on the list.

If there's a lot, do sample checks going down the list to see where the bulk of people seem to be giving up.

Focus on PRIVATELY warning folks on the list, starting at the top and working down to where trolling seems to taper off (usually after the first ten or so).

Again, though, a lot of this stuff depends on experience and judgment calls.

If you're new-ish to this work, tap your network and ask experienced folks.

If you don't have a network, stop doing this til you get one. It is not optional. We need each other.

LESSON 4: DIFFERENT LISTS POSE DIFFERENT RISKS

The major risk of a vetted short list is immediate intensive targeting of listed people. That we can't prevent, only mitigate.

The major risk of a long, poorly-vetted list like this one, though, is mass panic. That we CAN prevent.

We do this by privately warning folks while prophylactically suggesting to folks who don't do this work that they keep this knowledge private so the list just languishes.

We do this by educating others and each other about how to execute list warnings responsibly (PRIVATELY).

(There is one other new risk w a big list: it gets passed on by an Andy Ngo type to Musk, who executes mass bans on a whim. That said, most of these guys already have their own pet enemy lists on hand, they're unlikely to source something that high stakes off some random channel)

LESSON 5: ONCE THE HORSE HAS LEFT THE STABLE, USE IT AS A CHANCE TO EDUCATE

The silver lining here is, a lot of big accounts suddenly understand their skin is in the game even if they never signed up to play.

If there's no suppressing the list anymore, engage.

I think a lot of antifascists on here saw micro-celebs low-key bragging about list membership and kind of rolled our eyes.

Not because it isn't a human response, but because we understand this list is a very low risk one (or was, before it blew up) & it's hard to see people crowing about their antifa notoriety when they never cared that our families were getting swatted/housevisited/death threatened

It's never fun to feel like Cassandra, but that's kind of what being an antifascist is these days.

Those feelings are human, but our job is to show up well (or take time offline, if it's too triggering to respond effectively).

Showing up well means patience and grace sometimes.

LESSON 6: DO NOT TELL MARGINALIZED PEOPLE HOW TO FEEL ABOUT BEING ON A NAZI LIST

This is an important corollary to lesson 5.

Antifascist education is vital, but it has to be context-responsive.

Marginalized people are always at more risk in a crowd targeted by Nazis, whether a street protest or a mass report list.

For reasons that are hopefully obvious.

It is not helpful or accurate to treat them like they operate at the same level as, say, a listed white cis man.

Once the horse has left the stable and the list is circulating on mainstream Twitter (which hopefully doesn't happen again, but who knows), it *might* be helpful for EXPERIENCED folks to offer help/guidance on threat assessment for concerned targets depending on context.

But what is absolutely NOT okay or helpful is minimizing the fear of marginalized folks.

Pretty much all marginalized communities have internal and/or shared collective traumas, and many of them involve lists being made by violent fascists.

That fear is not unfounded.

Also, as I said before, Nazis are going to disproportionately target marginalized folks on these lists.

If the list has been converted to clickable format through well-intentioned "warning" tag-ins, that targeting process becomes exponentially easier and faster.

Marginalized folks are not overreacting when they express fear about being on that list.

It's a long list, but marginalized people are at disproportionate risk of individualized targeting.

And it only takes one obsessed Nazi to take this from harassment to tragedy.

SUMMARY:

- as a general rule of thumb, don't post even edited Nazi content unless you know what you're doing or have talked to someone who does

- warn privately. Don't post Nazi lists to Twitter don't tag people for them, don't amplify lists. Warn via mutuals if you must

- practice humility (researchers, this is for us). No one gets it right 100% of the time, not even the pros. Be real about your experience level, ask more experienced folks to vet your work regularly.

This means having a network first, and using it.

No network? Get one.

(Is this gatekeeping? YES. 100%. This is dangerous, sensitive work. Dangerous for the researchers, but also dangerous for a lot of other folks when done poorly. It is not just your ass on the line here. If you want to do the work, find someone to train you. It may take a while.)

Finally, when shit like this happens and you pass the point of suppressing the list from public consumption, educate-- IF AND ONLY IF you have the relevant experience and knowledge. Otherwise, check your ego and amplify someone who does instead.

This is dangerous stuff.

And even if you are an expert, acknowledge your own privileges and don't go around telling marginalized people they're overreacting, even if the overall distributed list risk is low (as here).

Marginalized people experience heightened risk here. They aren't overreacting.

OKAY. That was a lot, I know, but this whole list discourse has been a lot.

I hope this is useful for folks.

And I'll close by saying, I hope no one recieves this as me subtweeting or picking on the people who tried to warn others about Nazis targeting them.

Mistakes happen, impact is more important than intentions, but intentions also matter. And intentions were good here.

That's not to say those mistakes didn't hurt people, or that the people hurt aren't justified in potentially being angry about that.

But my intention with this thread isn't to call out, it's to call us all in to a place of learning.

That's how we grow and do better next time.

And not for nothing, but I learned all this by being in antifascist research community for a while and sometimes making my own mistakes.

And also by thankfully ALMOST making other mistakes and getting warned off by more experienced people.

That's how we grow together in liberatory work.

We learn from our mistakes, and then hopefully we help others learn not to repeat our mistakes.

Love and solidarity, folks.

The end.