X/Twitter/Meta/YouTube: Racism, Content Moderation, Bots, Russia and the Black Hammer
While working on this series of articles about the censorious collusion between Government and Big Tech as a result of the continued censorship of Murder Pop on social media, in particular the Viktoria Evans YouTube Channel, Murder Pop’s own Editor In Chief was again censored by X/Twitter.
This censorship occurred while tweeting about censorship by YouTube, critiquing YouTube and Google’s management decisions more broadly, and contrasting our content with that of the largest solo YouTuber, Mr Beast himself.
While the account was rightfully restored in about 8 hours and the suspension overturned, and while it’s unclear why it happened to begin with, and the nature of how it happened suggests intentional targeting rather than being flagged by ai moderation systems.
We will not be silenced by YouTube, X/Twitter, TikTok, or anyone else, even when they falsely label us and limit our distribution for relatively inoffensive content, contradicting of their owners claims about supporting free speech.
As we began to experience having our content on X systematically targeted and shadow banned, resulting in endless lost time building additional platforms for our business, to say nothing of disrupting our ability to chase leads and engage in the public discourse, we can not help but ask, “Is this what freedom of the press looks like in 2024?”
Existing across the social media platforms is a required distribution channel to build an audience in the current era of media, yet Murder Pop’s accounts were falsely labeled by X as having engaged in spam (we don’t spam links) “or other forms of platform manipulation”, and X informed us that our accounts may have their reach limited or be excluded from trends and search results.
Let’s take a look at some other inexplicable content moderation decisions made by X/Twitter. Advocating for Israel’s right to proportional response under the Laws of War in eliminating a terrorist threat? That’s advocating for violence.
Hoping that “dirty n*gger jews burn at the fucking stake”? Not a violation of safety policies, according to X/Twitter.
There are an endless number of examples just like this one; we did not feel it was useful to catalog more than this one example, but users report this kind of incongruence regularly. Benign comments are penalized; easily identifiable violations are supported.
The account below, edited to shield our users, posted dozens of bestiality videos over at least 3 days. We reported it, as did many others, but it remained on the platform for months before being deleted, garnering thousands of followers and hundreds of thousands of views.
Speaking of views, X/Twitter also has a bot problem, recently discussed by the outlet TechCrunch. Many of these appear to be “shelf accounts,” accounts left dormant for years to confer a false legitimacy, laundering propaganda from bad actors across social media platforms like X/Twitter.
You can see one example here where, in reply to our editors request for comment on the bestiality that was allowed to remain up, a crypto scam bot was the only reply.
These types of bots have become much more sophisticated over the years, not just by deploying large language model AI like ChatGPT, but in the presentation of the accounts themselves.
Elon Musk's X, formerly known as Twitter, published a press release suggesting that Super Bowl LVIII had more than 10 billion impressions and over 1 billion video views. But were they real?
CHEQ, a leading cybersecurity firm that tracks bots and fake users, provided the outlet Mashable with data suggesting that over 75% of traffic from X to its advertising clients' websites during the weekend of the Super Bowl was fake.
"I've never seen anything even remotely close to 50 percent, not to mention 76 percent," CHEQ CEO and founder Guy Tytunovich told Mashable. "I'm amazed… I've never, ever, ever, ever seen anything even remotely close."
"I almost decided not to go out [and publish the X/Twitter bot data] because we've never seen anything like it," he said.
Long gone are the days of ProjectPM (short for personality management, referring to industrial InfoSec software for managing accounts that use false personas) when such accounts were identified with relative ease by their poor construct.
As GMFUS describes,
Just as ill-gotten money needs to be moved from an illegitimate source into an established financial institution, disinformation is most powerful when a façade of legitimacy is created through “information laundering.”
…disinformation follows a similar pattern; only here, the currency is information and the reward is influence.
GMFUS also digs into how this impacts our national discourse, specifically
Twitter handle Jenn_Abrams, which was identified by Twitter in November 2017 as being linked to the Internet Research Agency. The account was originally established in 2014, routinely posted on a variety of political and apolitical topics, and garnered attention through divisive posts arguing about the need for race-based segregation among other incendiary topics.
This meme, posted by the Internet Research Agency account Jenn_Abrams on January 28, 2017, internal division up to and including civil war in the United States has been a Russian goal for decades.
Here’s another; and beyond the obvious questions, how much productivity is being leached as Americans, including some of our highest public officials, argue amongst themselves amid bad actors from foreign adversaries?
According to the Mueller report, which included a volume one and a volume two, jenn_abrams claimed to be a Virginian, and a Trump supporter, and grew to over 70,000 followers while being "used to influence the U.S. presidential election.”
Over 70,000 people signed over their email address to jenn_abrams and the Internet Research Agency, and provided who knows what other information in comments and private messages.
Here is the full Mueller Report for anyone interested in reading it. This was not limited to conservative targets, and it wasn’t limited to Twitter; they also ran large black social justice groups on Facebook and Instagram, including “Black Matters,” “Blacktivist,” and “Don’t Shoot Us”, and LGBTQ groups, including “LGBT United.”
A report by researchers at Columbia University, in partnership with New Knowledge, a cybersecurity company, found that "Instagram was perhaps the most effective platform for the Internet Research Agency," the same Russian troll farm we profiled last year in our report on Russian Astroturfing.
It also wasn’t limited to bots, social media, or even the internet. In the corporeal world, on July 29, 2022, the Department of Justice released information about an alleged Russian psychological influence operation directly involving American political organizations.
It did not name the groups directly, but based on the information that was released, "U.S. Political Group 2" allegedly referred to the Black Hammer Party, which describes itself as a "symbol of hope for the colonized working class,” and is accused of receiving funding from Russian Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, the head of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, which promotes secessionist movements in other countries. According to the released information, the implicated groups received "direction or control” on behalf of the FSB through Ionov.
In 2014, the Ionov and AGMR hosted a small conference of secessionist groups whose speakers included the head of the League of the South, a "Southern secession" group, Michael Hill. A larger conference in 2015, the first of several events in a series of meetings called "the Dialogue of Nations,” brought multiple separatist groups together. The International Russian Conservative Forum, held at the Moscow Hotel In Saint-Petersburg in March of 2015, included US and EU secessionist groups like Black Hammer, as well as Russian-backed separatists from eastern Ukraine.
The money Black Hammer allegedly received to act as an unregistered foreign agent for Russia is alleged to have been used in part to fund a protest at the headquarters of Meta Platforms, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, due to the censorship of any posts supporting the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, which the group was a vocal supporter of. A video of the protest was posted to YouTube on the groups YouTube channel.
The Black Hammer Party, also known as the Black Hammer Organization and simply the Black Hammers, is a now mostly defunct Black nationalist group that claims to advocate for anti-colonial causes on behalf of “all black and indigenous” people. They also promote anti-capitalism, and the “Land Back” movement, an effort to “take all of our continents back from the colonizer.”
The organization was founded in Atlanta, Georgia in 2019, by former members of the African People's Socialist Party. It rose to prominence amidst the George Floyd protests and the 2020–2023 United States racial unrest, when it tried to build a compound in the Rocky Mountains named "Hammer City."
While considered a far left extremist group, they have also objected to Covid vaccine mandates, voiced support and staged protests for the January 6 insurrectionists, whom the groups leader refers to as “Freedom Fighters,” promoted the Proud Boys, advocated for segregation in a video titled, “Why I agree with MAGA,” promoted election conspiracy theories, and vocally supported Marjorie Taylor Greene after she was removed from Twitter.
In April of 2020, the group launched a campaign via the hashtag “2BFrank,” arguing that Anne Frank’s story was an extension of colonialism and should not be taught because the “true victims of genocide” are “the African and Colonized.”
In an article on their website from February 2021 addressing accusations of antisemitism based on this campaign, the group claimed not to be anti-Semitic:
“Our criticisms have always been against white jews [sic], who have just as much blood on their hands as any other colonizer… It should go without saying that after World War 2, white jews would go on to colonize Palestine. Had Anne Frank lived, there is no doubt that she would have been among the millions of white jews [sic] who helped push Palestinian mothers into the sea to drown in order to take their land. Fuck Anne Frank.”
Meanwhile, just after May Day in 2021, the group’s Twitter account shared a post about burning copies of The Diary of Anne Frank which was retweeted over 700 times.
They also referred to Frank as a "bleach demon" and claimed that the proceeds from the sale of her diary fund a genocide against Palestinians.
According to multiple articles by the group, the group is “in full support of the abolishment of Israel.” An article from May 2021 on their website, titled Devil Colonizer Jews Continue Palestinian Genocide and Terrorism, states that Israel, “has been steadily ramping up its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians these past couple months as the bleach demon colonizer jews [sic] scream for genocide proudly and with a racism paralleled by its father colony, amerikkka.”
Another article published in 2021 praised Hamas stating that Israel “will be erased,” and the group also claimed that the United States and Israel were "scheming” to steal the West Bank “while the masses are distracted” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The leader of the group, Augustus C. Romain, Jr., was charged in federal court in April of 2023, accused of being part of a Russian psy op in exchange for money and other assistance from Alexandr Viktorovich Ionov, a Russian with connections to the FSB, Russia’s intelligence service, according to a federal indictment.
Romain was previously arrested in 2022 when officers responded to a home on Selwyn Court in Fayetteville, GA after a man called 911 and claimed he had been kidnapped by an organization. The man told the 911 operator that he was being held against his will in the home's garage.
In the kidnapping case, Romain was charged with two counts of aggravated sodomy, conspiracy to commit a felony, false imprisonment (party to a crime), kidnappings (party to a crime), aggravated assault (party to a crime), and criminal street gang activity.
According to the warrant, Romain pointed guns at the two victims and forced them into the garage so that he "could anally sodomize" at least one of them.
Stay skeptical, and stay safe out there.
Thank you for staying in the fight for “Freedom of Speech” !!! Appreciate your perseverance when facing challenges or roadblocks that seek to prevent our First Amendment rights! Great work & be safe!