The white supremacists who demonstrated over the week weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, may have felt their numbers guaranteed anonymity—but social-media users have been poring over images of the rally to identify those participants who engaged in violent clashes with counterprotesters.
The volunteer sleuthing started on Saturday morning, hours after the infamous tiki-torch march through the University of Virginia campus. “If you recognize any of the Nazis marching in #Charlottesville,” wrote a Twitter user named Logan Smith who runs the @YesYoureRacist account, “send me their names/profiles and I'll make them famous.”
The crowdsourcing invitation was quickly retweeted tens of thousands of times, and within hours some of the Citronella-scented white nationalists most prominent in press photos were identified. Some individuals were fingered by people who know them personally; others were ID'ed when clues from the Charlottesville photos were matched with images and information from social-media profiles.
Later on Saturday, pictures began to emerge depicting the weekend’s violent clashes—including a horrific and widely circulated photo of four white supremacists surrounding a black man on the ground, beating him with metal poles as others looked on. The confrontation lasted only a minute amid the chaos, and none of the men was arrested at the scene. The victim, Charlottesville resident Deandre Harris, was left with eight staples in his head, a broken wrist, and a chipped tooth.
In the wake of these bloodier pictures, a second wave of “digilante” sleuthing began. Most notably, on Twitter on Sunday, activist Shaun King sifted through other images from Charlottesville to find clearer shots of Harris’s assailants, then marshalled his 700,000-plus followers to identify them.
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05.15.2024