Black Twitter has a flawless clap back for trolls posing as black people with #BlackTwitterVerificationQuestions
Last Friday, Andrew Anglin, founder of the Neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer wrote up a blog post detailing a plan for members of the so-called “alt-right” to exact their revenge on Twitter for banning Jared Wyand, the man who started the anti-Semitic #DumpStarWars campaign, and Andrew Auernheimer, a white supremacist better known as weev.
In the post, “How to be a Nigger on Twitter,” Anglin describes how, in the past two years, he and his fellow trolls have been cultivating fake Twitter accounts pretending to be real black people with the goal of infiltrating black Twitter enclaves and “causing blacks to panic” by picking fights.
“This will create a serious problem for twitter, as blacks make up a large percentage of their userbase, and the way they handle it – and they will handle it poorly – will cause a media spectacle,” Anglin wrote. “[T]he chaos will effect the Black Lives Matter movement, which uses twitter as its primary platform. Activists will no longer be able to operate without being constantly suspicious that blacks responding to them are fake accounts.”
He continued:
Blacks are not really capable of grasping the concept of the internet as a worldwide platform, as they cannot grasp the concept that anything exists beyond their own sphere. So you can easily say “nigga I no u,” and they will believe it. You can also reinforce this by using random names of made-up shared acquaintances.
To Anglin’s credit, he was right about one thing: Twitter is distressingly, embarrassingly bad at dealing with its harassment problem.
But what Anglin didn’t seem to understand is the very simple fact that black people are neither stupid nor unfamiliar with racist white people trying to target them online.
Yesterday, people on Twitter began passing around screenshots of Anglin’s post and digitally rolling their eyes at the idea that anyone could be tricked into thinking one of Anglin’s scripted “black characters” were actual people.
Rather than merely dismissing Anglin’s call to action as the waste of time that it was, though, a number of people began poking fun at the would-be trolls with #BlackTwitterVerificationQuestions, a series of inside jokes that would make immediate sense to black people, but baffle anyone who actually thought that were were some sort of BlackTwitter™ verification process.
#BlackTwitterVerificationQuestionsComplete the phrase:
Beans, ______ , Potatoes, TomatoesA) Kale
B) Greens
C) Eggplant
D) Spinach
— Jimi aka Mr. Smith (@JimiEarly) December 14, 2016
At the time of publishing, it’s unclear what (if any) impact Anglin’s plan to sow chaos amongst black people has had, but we, the Black People of Twitter, seem to be doing just fine: