How @YesYoureRacist became the internet's fastest tool to identify white supremacists

Image: zach d roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images

On Friday, some of America's most racist trolls hatched from their egg avatars to wave Home Depot tiki torches and chant their fave Nazi, KKK, and white supremacist slogans in Charlottesville.  

Yet some were nonetheless caught off guard when their very public displays of hate were made, well, public. 

Twitter account @YesYoureRacist enjoined users to circulate photos of the Charlottesville marchers in hopes of identifying them over the weekend. It didn't take long for the account's popularity to surge and for the messages to flood in.

On Saturday morning, the account had close to 60,000 followers. By Tuesday afternoon, that had soared to 372,000.

But this wasn't how the Twitter account began. Smith had a smaller, slightly more satirical vision, one that came to serve a much larger cause.

When Logan Smith first started @YesYoureRacist in October 2012, his mission was less personal than it is now. Smith wanted to spotlight social media users who claimed they weren't racist to justify saying something totally textbook racist.

"It started as a lighthearted way of poking fun at folks who tweet "I’m not racist" and then post some other ridiculous racist comments," Smith said.

The "I'm not a racist, but" racist was a caricature Smith wanted to expose, and a quietly dangerous one at that. Smith's account came out of a specific time and place, when hate crimes were much lower than they are now and conversations about race, gender and sexuality seemed to be moving forward, however lethargically. 

With the rise of President Donald Trump, however, all of that changed. Trump was a man who made racists feel comfortable, who encouraged them to come out of their basements and into the public, where they could defend their hate speech on the grounds of "free speech."

@YesYoureRacist suddenly had a whole new field of public racists to cull from.

"Over the past couple years, the situation in the United States has kind of deteriorated with race, especially with the election of Donald Trump," Smith said. "So the [focus] of the account has taken a more serious tone."

The events in Charlottesville over the past weekend sharpened James' resolve. While many people tend to think of trolls as meme-making basement dwellers, these were neo-Nazis and white nationalists walking freely and in the open. The violence they once casually threatened over the internet felt — and ended up being — all too physical and real. A woman counter-protesting against their hate was killed when an Ohio man charged his car into the street, ramming through the demonstration and injuring several others. Heather Heyer's death was lauded by KKK leaders. 

Many white nationalists travelled across the country to make their hate known.

"Not a single person I heard about was from Charlottesville," Smith said. "They were from outside the area. People who came to the area to start trouble. And that’s what they got."

Charlottesville's white supremacists appeared to be a different kind of creature than the "I'm not racist, but" kind of racist Smith was used to dealing with. Their belief system may have been similar, but there was one key difference: They weren't hiding.

"On Saturday morning I woke up and saw photos from Friday night. It's angry white men carrying tiki torches of all things but it's something much more serious," Smith said. "It harkens back to the Nuremberg rallies. There are photos where you can hardly tell the difference between the two. You grow up seeing these things in history books but ... it's right now and here."

When Smith first made the call for folks to identify the marchers and send him their public profiles, he immediately got "hundreds of names."

Identifying the marchers was a relatively easy task. "These people tend to be very vocal about their beliefs," Smith said. "Basically, I just go through their profiles and look at other photos of them and the kind of stuff they're posting."

Smith has had multiple successes. He was able to identify Cole White, one of the most visibly angry faces from the march. White was then forced to resign from his job at a libertarian hot dog restaurant (Welcome to Berkeley).

He's also been able to locate some of these white supremacists in photos with prominent Republican politicians, some of whom later disavowed these neo-Nazis on Twitter.

Critics contend that @YesYoureRacist is a form of doxxing that encourages a mob mentality. The account does make mistakes — and has become tangentially related to doxxing campaigns of the wrong people. 

It mistakenly said pro-Trump comedian Joey Salads, who claimed to be denouncing Nazis by wearing a Swastika at another Trump rally awhile ago, was among the torch-wielding crowd when he wasn't. Also, that photo of the man in a red Arkansas Engineering shirt in one of the tweets above turned this weekend into a nightmare for the wrong man. The internet misidentified the white supremacist as an engineering professor, who received a flood of vulgar and frightening messages as a result. 

The account also tweeted out, and then deleted, the personal information of a Twitter user known as Millennial Matt who frequently jokes about the Holocaust, violating Twitter's terms of service.  

By taking on these people directly, Smith knows he risks making mistakes. Despite this — and the numerous death threats he's received  — this is still a challenge he's willing to tackle.

And Smith isn't alone. He's been joined by prominent journalists and activists, including New York Daily News' Shaun King, who often don't trust Attorney General Jeff Sessions to manage the Department of Justice's work justly and expeditiously, and who find real social value in holding these folks up for all of the internet to see.  

These aren't white supremacists hiding privately in  their own homes, they contend. They've given media interviews. They've shown their face in public. If they want to be public, they risk public shaming. 


Yes, you're racist, Smith contends, and you're going to be held accountable.

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