Meet NAFO, Twitter’s Latest Harassment Network
The story is a familiar one. An edgy political group on Twitter takes a meme, attaches it to their cause du jour, find themselves in the right place at the right time and a movement is born. The latest such movement is NAFO — or North Atlantic Fellas Organisation. It is a social media collective formed in May 2022, three months after the escalation of the war in Ukraine, with the ostensible purpose of fundraising for Ukrainian defence and to combat Russian propaganda on Twitter. However, one year later their core members are among the most aggressive, dehumanising gang-stalkers on Twitter and the movement has strayed from its initial focus and become a run-of-the-mill anti-conservative harassment crew.
NAFO was accidentally birthed by Polish national Kamil Dyszewski on May 24th 2022. As Dyszewski explains, “The First Fella was made on May 19…Somebody called us the new NATO or something like that and I just replied with ‘NAFO’. Then I just took the NATO badge, changed NATO to NAFO and added a head of a ‘fella’ peeking out. And there we are.” The ‘fella’ in question is a ‘shiba inu’ doge, a popular meme from the early 2010s, today best known as the face of cryptocurrency dogecoin. Dyszewski made custom doges for use as Twitter avatars in exchange for donations to the Ukrainian war effort. NAFO went viral and now there are hundreds of ‘fellas’, increasingly American…
