How a group of black women outed Twitter trolls masquerading as women of color in 2014, in what may have been a dry run for the 2016 misinformation campaign
Before Gamergate, before the 2016 election, they launched a campaign against Twitter trolls masquerading as women of color. Tweets: @cjane87 , @jamilsmith , @wesleylowery , @mckaycoppins , @yair_rosenberg , @heyydnae , @millicentsomer , @alexmleo , @aprilaser , @ericajoy , and @brooklynmarie Tweets: Jane Coaston / @cjane87 : This is a fantastic piece that is worth reading for everyone. To conservatives and liberals alike: if you see something on Twitter that seems to play exactly into your ideological priors about another group of people, MAYBE IT'S A HOAX. http://slate.com/... http://twitter.com/... Jamil Smith / @jamilsmith : Before Gamergate, before the 2016 election, a group of black feminists launched a campaign called #YourSlipisShowing against Twitter trolls who were masquerading as women of color. If only more people had paid attention. Essential work here from @heyydnae. http://slate.com/... Wesley / @wesleylowery : It's probably the newspaper reporter in me, but I really wish this piece had pushed these folks for an on-the-record response to the fact that they fell for — and based sweeping screeds about their political opponents — on a hoax http://slate.com/... http://twitter.com/... McKay Coppins / @mckaycoppins : I give this advice to every audience I speak to about the current political/media era: Anytime you see a story that perfectly confirms your worldview, be suspicious! http://twitter.com/... @yair_rosenberg : When I talk to college students about how to avoid being fooled by fake news, I tell them the most important thing is to be suspicious of anything on social media that too conveniently confirms their biases. You'll never regret taking the time to investigate something like that. http://twitter.com/... Rachelle D'nae / @heyydnae : Before GamerGate, before the 2016 election and before Charlottesville, black women spotted the violent threat that trolling posed. Me on #YourSlipIsShowing, which came at a time when most dismissed trolls' rhetoric as ironic. These women knew it wasn't http://slate.com/... Lili Loofbourow / @millicentsomer : “the clearest red flag was the accounts' inability to hide their contempt for the very people they were attempting to imitate.” This @heyydnae piece about a group of black feminists who tried to expose the alt-right trolls impersonating them is incredible http://slate.com/... Alex Leo / @alexmleo : While @jack is paling around with Trump, read this infuriating story about how Twitter lets the right wing craft fake narratives on here to “prove” liberals are nuts & how they ignored the black women who first caught the trend http://slate.com/... April Glaser / @aprilaser : Essential reading for anyone working on disinformation and harassment online. How black feminists were attacked first and fought back http://slate.com/... by @heyydnae Erica Joy / @ericajoy : Read this (twice, maybe) then share it, especially if you've never seen or heard of the hashtags mentioned in the story. http://slate.com/... Brooke Binkowski / @brooklynmarie : As I've been saying... if something arouses a strong emotional response in you, be it anger, fear, schadenfreude, check your sources. Look for emotional keywords. Disinformation can be true or untrue but its aim is to provoke emotional and thus irrational responses http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Before Gamergate metastasized and before the 2016 election, black feminists ran #YourSlipIsShowing — wait, that ID belongs to the Avaaz study; the campaign itself was a volunteer effort in which black women documented and exposed Twitter accounts posing as women of color to seed inflammatory takes. The Slate piece is a 2019 retrospective arguing the episode was a rehearsal for the industrialized misinformation later seen around the election.
What makes the retrospective land is how well the pattern it describes maps onto later coverage: Twitter's own feed algorithms were inserting tweets from unfollowed accounts into users' timelines, sometimes amplifying extremist rhetoric, while researchers found a small cluster of right-wing Facebook accounts driving a disproportionate share of false voter-fraud posts.
First-order effects
- The exposed troll accounts lost their core asset — a borrowed identity — forcing the operators behind them to rebuild personas or abandon them, while journalists like Jamil Smith and Wesley Lowery amplified the exposé to mainstream audiences.
Second-order effects
- Platforms' engagement machinery worked against the sleuths: Twitter's practice of surfacing tweets from unfollowed accounts meant fabricated-persona content could reach beyond the troll's follower base precisely when it was most inflammatory.
Third-order effects
- If the 2014-to-2016 arc holds, detection of manufactured personas shifts from volunteer communities to institutionalized trust infrastructure — the same problem space now occupied by provenance and verification tooling for synthetic media — while regulators face mounting evidence that a small number of coordinated accounts drive most viral falsehoods.
The trend: Fabricated online personas have evolved from niche trolling into industrialized political misinformation, pushing detection from volunteer sleuthing toward platform-level and regulatory trust infrastructure.