The Epik breach has some security mistakes in it that are so damaging they take my breath away. But I guess this shouldn’t be surprising given Rob Monster’s approach to business. A thread. Here’s the Epik CEO trying to hire Jack Corbin, aka Daniel McMahon, serial harasser, cyber stalker now sitting in jail.

It’s time to talk about what happens after de-platforming: Nick Fuentes lasted 5 days after being kicked off Twitter before creating a new account. It has a name mocking sexual assault, groyper avatar, advertises his show, and follows all his other briefly deplatformed orbiters. De-platformed high status individuals lose their brand and follower count (1k vs 130k in his case) when they come back, but they almost always return shortly after the ban. (They are easily detectable, so why do the platforms let them back?)

Finally - here's my accepted paper on the DLive video streaming service and how it's being used by far-right propagandists to earn money (Apr 2020-Jan 2021). Lots of data! Here are some of the largest cash-outs including some post-insurrection refunds arxiv.org/abs/2105.05929 Here is the network of streamers (pink) and donors (gray) - only showing donors who gave at least 10,000 lemons ($120) for visibility, otherwise too much data! You can read more about the different labels in the paper, but A is Groypers, B is MurderTheMedia, etc.

LBRY is one of a new crop of "uncensorable" blockchain-based content hosting sites, unsurprisingly run by a libertarian tech bro. They recently launched a "Youtube killer" called Odysee & set about trying to attract fascists. Yet, they are having some struggles. Let's explore. First, and most embarrassingly, Odysee is trying to act like they rolled their own livestreaming tech solution. Fact is, they seem to have just hired the programmer for Bitwave (goes by Dispatch/Xander) & are running all their livestreams through the Bitwave[.]tv infrastructure.

One thing I do to wind down after a long day is open your public source code and check out what your programmer is up to. I de-obfuscate the code, run a few tests, then contact every company involved in the tech stack keeping you online. It’s up to them whether to let you persist I document everything, send updates to people who are keeping up with all this, and thank everyone profusely who helps keep the internet safe from violence-inspiring, racist antisemites like you. Then I go to bed and do it again the next day.

I was just answering a survey with a question about how "Extremist actors use the internet and social media differently than the average user." Here are 6 ways I have observed far-right extremist actors behaving differently online: 1. Harassment of users. Harassment is a key entertainment activity for these people, and can be carried out both on a single platform AND between platforms (i.e. advertising on Telegram for a DLive channel that is livestreaming a Discord raid).

After being tipped off by a sympathetic employee about imminent bans, the 3D printed gun & boogaloo communities on Keybase are in a tizzy. Keybase, now owned by Zoom, is finally banning homemade firearms & explosives content. A thread- 3D printed gun groups are some of the largest on Keybase, some with over 26k members. This affinity over guns is why some Boog groups moved there back in July as they were de-platformed elsewhere.

Here's a cache of flyers I've been collecting from different social media platforms (both mainstream & niche) advertising Jan 17 RW extremist anti-gov rallies in state capitals. I started collecting these on Nov 23. Couple people have asked for them, so here is the collection. I drew the lines on so they would be less likely to be used as propaganda.

No, NYT. This is an incorrect and harmful overly simplified characterization and also stop quoting this pathological woman-hater. He literally wrote a piece of garbage six days ago calling women slaves of satan. splcenter.org/fighting-hate/… Link if anyone needs it. nytimes.com/2020/11/20/us/…

Here's a pretty interesting story you might have missed. Back in the 1990s, Neo-Nazi David Wolfgang Hawke made a bunch of money as one of the early "spam kings", converted it into gold bars & buried it somewhere. 1/ After losing a spam lawsuit to AOL, Hawke's parents' land was dug up to settle the suit but the gold was never found. Hawke went on the run and was living under an assumed identity in Squamish as a progressive Canadian vegan rock climbing pick-up artist called "Jesse James". 2/

I'll use this thread to tweet some today about the Alamance County Trump Convoy (co-sponsored by the dregs of neo-Confederate hate group ACTBAC & Alamance Cty Young Republicans). So far the only interesting thing is that the Trump Hate Convoy is attracting some Facebook spammers running video scams. Here are some fellows all abbreviating their names "Md" who claim to be livestreaming on some sketchy site and are filling the comments section.

I've been wondering which media sources have been pumping Facebook full of anger about "antifa" for the past 30 days. Here's a breakdown of the data. Let's start with the Crowdtangle leaderboard. What do we learn? (1) The "antifa" Facebook leaderboard is absolutely dominated by right-wing and far-right-wing media, in particular Ben Shapiro and David J Harris Jr, each of whom got more than a million interactions with their "antifa" posts.

The statement from Facebook in your #5 tweet is a hamfisted, pitiful attempt at both-sidesism. I am not aware of the reach of IGD and Crimthinc on the FB platform, but I suspect that Facebook is not their main avenue of outreach so I hope that ... 1/4

https://twitter.com/daveyalba/status/1296223859356688385

..the practical damage from this action will be minimally disruptive. However, it is an incredible slap in the face to these organizations, both of which have painstakingly grown themselves from standalone websites - and in Crimethinc's case from zines - and which have ... 2/4

Unfortunately the SPLC's new podcast at soundslikehate.org has been blacklisted by @CiscoUmbrella (opendns) so anyone who is using a computer that has this corporate spyware installed is unable to listen.

https://twitter.com/splcenter/status/1292936293639491585

I don't know if the blocking by Cisco was accidental or malicious but @splcenter needs to follow the instructions on this site support.opendns.com/hc/en-us/artic… and send some email like this one to support@opendns.com to get this block lifted.

A Facebook mystery. Back in Oct & Nov 2019 I was getting so many threats each day on FB that I was able to construct a chart showing which threats sent to me were deemed a violation and which ones weren't. You can see this graphic here: Today, I noticed that ALL those reports are gone from my support inbox, and only a few unrelated messages remain. These remaining messages all have update dates between May 7-23, 2020. Some examples below - note that even the violations are now marked "update soon".

Here’s 12 secs showing everything you need to know about southern small town policing. Our county sheriff w/ his arm around the founder of SPLC-designated hate group ACTBAC during a permitted BLM march. Sheriff went on to personally arrest at least 1 BLM protestor for “language”. @AylingLindsay has more on the "language" charge

https://twitter.com/AylingLindsay/status/1282073663198683136?s=20

Guy in hammerskin nation shirt celebrating the Confederacy in Graham today along with League of the South, ACTBAC and other hate groups (sorry so blurry) during our BLM march :( Family with very small children taking turns holding sign about “colored TVs”

The question I get most on the subject of de-platforming racist/fascist/white supremacist types is "If we kick them off mainstream sites, won't they just go to other places and [fill in bad stuff here]?" In this thread I'm going to explain why this is a poor rationale. First, we need to remember that de-platforming directly undercuts the Bad Guys' ability to achieve their 3 main goals when using social media: Propaganda, Organization, and Trolling/Harassment. Specifically...

Facebook didn't say which groups/pages/ppl were banned today so we have to piece that together. For example, Citizens Liberty Organization (formerly Big Igloo, infamously banned on Discord last week w/ 2500 members) Page is gone on FB, but its associated private Group is not.

https://twitter.com/BrandyZadrozny/status/1278057191598104581

Now the private group sits without a mod on FB but it's only down 2-3 members. They've been scrambling all weekend to set up alternate arrangements. Also they're mad at me. 😂 Y'all I had nothing to do with the FB ban but ok

This is the Nationalist Social Club (see what they did there with swapping the "-ist" from one word to the other?) Fun fact about these guys is that North Face clothing put in a copyright complaint to Telegram and got a lot of NSC's posts banned. Hard to do that on Telegram.

https://twitter.com/lilsarg/status/1276942692619038722

Another fact about them is they are growing in the South. They have a "Dixie" chapter which swept up some of the members leftover from the TWP debacle.

This RapeWaffen Telegram channel mentioned here was so violent and awful I made a full copy of it back on 21-Dec-2019 because a *different* guy in there was claiming to be a helicopter pilot, bragging about all the women he'd sexually assaulted while deployed.

https://twitter.com/SeamusHughes/status/1275171417491988481

The channel was started by "Sinister Noctulian" whose last Telegram post was on Jan 10 2020, the same date an Atomwaffen ODU student William Kirby Kelley was picked up for swatting. Not sure if those incidents are related. krebsonsecurity.com/tag/atomwaffen…