Discord Leaks Reveal Anticom Members Behind Fake Antifa Accounts
A massive leak of Discord chat logs has revealed that members of Anticommunist Action are behind several fake Antifa troll accounts on social media.
On September 5, 2017, Unicorn Riot leaked hundreds of thousands of chat messages from white supremacist Discord servers, a monumental achievement that exposed the inner workings of several hate groups, particularly those that organized last year’s disastrous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In the leaked chat logs, we found that members of the Anticommunist Action server discussed creating accounts for the Fake Antifa campaign, an ongoing memetic operation against the antifascist movement.
Below are two examples of Anticom members admitting to having created fake Antifa accounts. However, the Fake Antifa campaign itself was also discussed in the Traditional Workers Party Discord server.
On April 2, 2017, Mtn_B34R of Anticom claimed to have created Cape Cod Antifa, a now-defunct fake Antifa Twitter account.
On the same day, user webdavanon asked in the #general channel:
“so who else in here are (sic) making the fake antifa twitter chapters? Cause those are fucking hilarious”
As we covered in our Memetic Warfare series, the fake Antifa campaign is far from humorous: Hundreds of troll accounts have dedicated themselves to spreading misinformation about antifascists and manipulating unsuspecting Americans on both sides of the political spectrum.
The right-wing origin of fake Antifa profiles is also highlighted on 4chan’s infamous /pol/ forum.
In August of last year, we wrote about a Bellingcat investigation that underlined the relationship between the smear campaign and 4chan.
On 4chan itself, a user claimed responsibility for I.E. Antifa on Christmas Eve of 2017.
And on February 18, 2018, an anonymous user claimed Laguna Beach Antifa was “one of OUR fake twitter guys” after the troll account spread fake news about the Parkland, Florida school shooting.
At the time of publication, we have cataloged over 220 fake Antifa troll accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. The majority of them operate on Twitter, although some have also been found on Gab and Minds.
