The Shadow Movement: Reflecting on 10 Years of Attacks as We Get Ready for 10 More
In all the crisis about moderation and banning policies at Twitter, a very important history is being re-written. These policy debates over moderation and banning are being overwhelmingly framed as a matter of right-wing vs left-wing voices being given priority on the platform. As the story of “woke” liberals creating demands on Twitter the corporation, causing right wing voices to be censored; the story of “woke” Twitter employees who pursued a political agenda to the detriment of free and democratic speech — all set for correction now.
But in case anyone has forgotten, this whole fight over Twitter’s policies started in the early 2010’s, because one set of users (wayyyy before MAGA) began attacking another group of users, ruthlessly, brutally, and usually anonymously; terrorizing people with the group swarming of individuals, their families and workplaces, SWATTing, doxxing, defacing search engine results, hacking and publishing nude and explicit material, creating fake webpages and spreading incorrect or misleading information, stalking, sometimes long-term (my worst stalker lasted 18 months), both digitally and in person, sending 1000s of rape and death threats, horrific violent and sexual photo manipulation, deep fakes, trying to drive people to suicide and get them fired from their jobs and cast out from their communities.
And this was being done to dozens, then hundreds, eventually thousands of people; accumulating to tens of thousands; the same techniques, the same language, the same groups, over and over again, for years, growing stronger with each attack.
This was not a symmetrical attack that Twitter the corporation jumped into and picked sides on; this was one group of users declaring war on another group of users, and fighting them with terrorism that literally ruined lives and communities.
How many attacks? In the past ten years?
How many attacks have been made on people…
people in our
movements?
Our movements which are now dead?
For each movement we had, there was this, the Shadow Movement — the counter-movement against all of the major movements that have emerged from the left in the past 10 years. The Shadow Movement had no bounds; it calls your work, shows up at your house, sends rape threats to your kids (literally), threatens to kill you, sends SWAT to your door in the middle of the night, oh, they just hacked butt pics from your phone and sent them to everyone you’ve ever met since high school. And your boss. The Shadow Movement wasn’t “online”, it was everywhere it needed to be to scare people; the “online” part caused people to dismiss and minimize it, but they would attack your LIFE until you stayed down.
The Shadow Movement slipped from platform to platform, organizing on 4chan, on 8chan, on Reddit, on KiwiFarms, from HackerNews, spilling onto Twitter, Facebook, e-mail in tens of thousands of anonymous accounts and burying individuals in weeks of continuous harassment. Anything that was a Movement, was attacked by the Shadow Movement. #MeToo. Diversity in Tech. Women in Tech. BLM. Defund the Police. Representation in Media. The Anti-Surveillance movement, Abolish ICE. The movements for trans-inclusivity and queer power and mental health. Wealth re-distribution. Universal healthcare. All of it.
We’ve called this “online harassment” to minimize it, but that term alone has done an incredible cover-up for what is actually a fascist counter movement to every socially progressive effort that has occurred in the past ten years and more. The heat was not returned — much against my advice, I wanted to go ham on these fucks; the point being, that this was not a “both sides” thing, this was one side not doing shit except some very basic organizing around socially progressive issues, not even radical ideas (“we should have some more women in tech, don’t you think?” is not even a radical position); and the other side organizing more and more and more to literally stop potentially life-saving social efforts in their tracks by decimating its crew and scaring its people.
*This* was the attack on free speech that ACTUALLY started the fight over Twitter moderation, 10 years ago now. The terrorism from the Shadow Movement is what people were organizing against when they began a many-year campaign for Twitter to step up and do more to LITERALLY PREVENT DEATH THREATS AIMED AT THEIR CHILDREN and stop bot-armies from screaming KILL YOURSELVES at people with depression for weeks on end.
This was never about kicking off Republican media, deplatforming media figures — the harassment never even had a Republican tone, it was fascists. This wasn’t about Republicans, it wasn’t about MAGA, it wasn’t about right-wing extremist podcasts; it was about ending life-ruining harassment from a rapidly-morphing, highly-organized group of anonymous fascist sociopaths. The ask was not even about kicking people off who were racist and homophobic and misogynistic… not at all. It was to kick off people who were threatening women with rape, thousands of times, and forcing them to leave their homes in fear, and pick up the pieces of a broken life executed by an extremely organized hit mob.
That was the *actual* problem on the table, as it also the problem now.
The lineage of the Shadow Movement has nothing to do with MAGA, even though it is now comfortably cloaked in it, disguised — no, this started years before MAGA. Trump didn’t announce his presidency until 2015; by then, Milo Yianppolus, who started out as a tech reporter btw, was taking online attacks to entirely new levels. Way before MAGA, the Sierra attacks, the attacks on Roberts and Sarkeesian, and Gamergate itself, had already been global events and media phenomenon; women in tech and its sub-industry in gaming, SPECIFICALLY were living in fear of attacks; a new school of independent women of color activists responding to the digital age, was being pummeled non-stop; and the topic of “online harassment” was foremost in not only the technology press but in the mainstream press. (After all, everyone loves stories of girls being totally fucking terrorized, and it drove absolutely massive amounts of traffic to blogs and media in general.)
This isn’t about fucking Republicans, it never was, and it isn’t now.
This came from Ban Town, GNAA, Encyclopedia Dramatic, Reddit, Hacker News, 4 and 8chan and Kiwifarms. Guess what? These sites were all founded by, used by, led by, dominated by, computer programmers and people in the tech sector, who have been doing this shit since the first days of online; you HAD to be technical in order to set up the type of infrastructure they were operating and to pull off the techniques they used, and they remain technical techniques even today — mining years of internet history, getting into obscure databases not indexed on the public web, hacking into personal devices and attempting to simultaneously get into I.e. 15+ years of someone’s accounts, DDoSing websites, SWATTing, social engineering, creating revenge websites, defacing SEO, using crypto to cover financial tracks, selecting permissive infrastructure and hosting these messaging boards without take-downs from vendors, organizing distributed teams to mobilize on specific attacks and i.e. determine someone’s address from a glimpse of a house in a photo from 8 years ago. These techniques were innovated by programmers; doxxing, SWATing, swarming, hacking, creating revenge sites / SEO defacing, early use of crypto to pay for infrastructure and support individual terrorists, anonymous/semi-anonymous posting, calling, emailing, faxing; defacing photographs, meme warfare/terrorism, bots and deep-fakes.
The Shadow Movement came out of tech, and that’s really important context for what is happening right now. Elon is not platforming some independent party outside of the tech elite’s agenda; this is a party that VCs have known, started, encouraged and funded. This is… *their* shadow political party. And this is the red carpet rolling out to it.
Trust me, these people don’t go out of their way for anything but their own ends and power. That’s why women in tech were its first targets, and that is why tech billionaires are converging on Twitter *specifically* to get *their* Shadow Movement back in gear: this whole thing is a tech op.
The Shadow Movement has even been implicated in murders and shootings, and in recent years, multiple mass shootings, most recently the Buffalo Supermarket shooting which killed 10 - the shooter was inspired by 4chan; ditto in the Christchurch mosque shootings, the Poway synagogue shooting, the El Paso shooting. “Online harassment”? Okay! These groups are also associated with causing suicide in targets.
In the beginning, there weren’t any efforts to disguise the fact that this was the tech industry, especially as its first major targets were… women in tech. But over time this fact got obscured in a mismash of tropes: “alienated white man” , “angry unstable teen”, “chronically online basement-dwelling losers”. No one thought about Apple engineers and Facebook engineers sitting at their big fancy offices who were doing this, the VCs who were funding hate sites like Reddit and HackerNews, the tech executive teams who were just watching this happen and could have easily done something at any point, or the similarity of the industry’s professional “trolling culture” with the attacks or the motives, or of the technical infrastructure needed to pull this off for years on end. Almost no one even said shit as creator of 4chan moved on some years ago from the site and was hired by… Google. As a programmer, his largest achievement will always be building things on the internet that resulted in mass terrorism, trauma, destruction of movements and even mass shootings. No wonder Google wanted him! On their… Social media team!!!
Wow. Never gonna recover from that one.
As the attacks became more mainstream and started getting tons of media attention, TONS of media attention (they had shock value), more and more people outside of tech joined these gangs and learned these techniques as well to get a piece of the glory. This is also how tech fascist ideology was spread to the mainstream, through recruitment and enfolding into an already operating machine. It could just sweep people along in a never-ending adrenaline fest of hunting and destroying.
It was MAGA that got these techniques from tech fascists, not the other way around, as we now commonly seem to believe; the Shadow Movement has maintained its own consistent character and persists today; it does not obey the timing of election cycles, even though it may participate in them. It shares some Republican values, but its pretty obvious that this is tech fascists, not Republicans. Anyone who uses these techniques, got them from tech; and tech is still the dominating force in their structure.
As you can see with all that’s going on with Elon; the confusion over his ideology is because people cannot stop thinking of things in terms of Dem/Republican, when we have an entirely different political party we’re dealing with here: tech fascists.
The Shadow Movement has always been right there for every movement we’ve started and it had grown as our movements grew. They attacked the tech feminist movement that was starting to thrive in the early 2010s, terrorizing literally hundreds of women in public attacks that resulted in widespread fear and massive suppression of feminist activism in the industry. If it wasn’t for those attacks, there would be an indie tech press to this day. They attacked the fandoms where cultural productions of critique and resistance was occurring; this was to be the basis of the diversity and representation movement in Hollywood; the related attack on Leslie Jones for appearing in an updated version of GhostBusters, was led by a technofascist ,Milo Yianappolus (oh yes, he comes out of the tech industry too, something that very few people seem to remember now).
The Shadow Movement has terrorized employees of abortion non-profits, and reproductive rights proponents. They started attacking Black activists with more and more vigor as the resistance to police violence took off. Facebook moderators for different local and regional Black Lives Matter chapters, many of them women, talked about how severe the backlash was to them by these groups even at the level of the local chapters and gatherings and their personal Facebook pages. Political/leftist sex workers were mass-reported on these platforms as they were building a sex-worker inclusive and informed feminism. Liberal journalists and even Congresswomen were forced to leave their houses. They went after Tara Reade for trying to expose her rapist in the President of the United States — again, these aren’t Republicans, they are fascists. They haven’t accorded with any American political party because they aren’t an American political party.
They were specifically targeting our rising leaders, theorists, activists, intelligentsia and organizers, nipping them in the bud at what should have been the beginning of a beautiful and glorious life contributing to the cause. Cut short. How much of that? How much did that cost us?
Everytime there was a social disruption, for every movement we had, the Shadow Movement followed it, tried to trip it, pull it down, dismantle it person-by-person; at every step, it was platformed by the tech industry, funded by the tech industry, run by people in the industry, often from work.
Today when you look around to see what the status of all our glorious movements have been: MeToo, Black Lives Matter, women/diversity in tech, the anti-ICE movement; everything is so dead, so disorganized; we haven’t even been able to mount a remotely sufficient response to losing Roe v. Wade. And the Shadow Movement has EVERYTHING to do with that.
It has been so, so easy to minimize the scope of this issue; we find it perhaps hard to believe that this “online harassment” could have done this to us, that it might very well be among the greatest factors that have destroyed our movements. The general attitude is that if you just ignore it and don’t let it affect you, you can rise above it; it’s just online harassment, after all. And because most of these targets have been women (men in tech REALLY hate women), it was easy to dismiss them as well.
But the whole time, it was taking people out of the game: both people who were being attacked, and those who didn’t want to risk it because they had families and livelihoods to protect.
You can’t arrive at minimizing fascist terrorism as “online harassment” without minimizing “online activism”; these are two sides of the same coin. All so incredibly depoliticized, so incredibly individualized. Calling it “online harassment” is an op; treating this as if it were some bit of bother subordinate to REAL harassment, even though we could see in real time that this was in no way different or less impactful than, presumably and nebulously, “other” harassment; in fact, it exceeded all previous bounds of what harassment meant.
I was attacked by these groups in 2014 and 2015, specifically for my role promoting feminism in tech; I am still recovering from those attacks today, and my magazine, which was the only independent tech press, never did.
These are attack techniques that ruin lives and ruin movement infrastructure and movement organization. This is the terrorism that fascists have always done, just a different platform.
Calling it “online activism” is an op, and this one is the Left’s fault too; particularly groups like the DSA that have always talked down to and kicked aside independent feminists, always independent feminists, as “online activism.” Because “real organizing happens offline” and other bullshit, as if the DSA campaigning for free passing out flyers for the Dem establishment is somehow “real activism”. Uhhh…
using the motherfucking internet to do this work indicates only a modern movement that is using the tools and technologies of the modem time. Obviously. You fucking idiots. You absolute fucking morons the internet is literally just a comms tool what the fuck. “Oh you used communications, your activism isn’t real”? Are you out of your fucking minds? Who the fuck do you think was fermenting and emerging these movements, and educating people and organizing people, getting people on the street, setting up protests, creating community teach-ins and educational programs, vigils, setting up harm reduction and mutual aid, and raising tons of money for the movement? Calling it “online activism” never made sense and calling it “online harassment” never made sense; it will be looked back at as a ludicrous, dishonest, disruptive linguistic hat-trick, somehow shaming people as “lazy” and “stupid” and “armchair” just because they… were using the motherfucking internet to get shit done, same as the rest of the fucking world since the 90s.
WE ARE NOT GOING TO SURVIVE THE NEXT ROUND OF THIS UNTIL WE UNDERSTAND VERY CLEARLY WHAT WE ARE DEALING WITH AND WHAT HAPPENED HERE.
How do you even begin to quantify the scale of this? 10 years of attacks? Encyclopedia Dramatica hosts 15,171 content pages. How many of those are pages devoted to women, created by people that hate them, to haunt their days? How many raids and attacks can 4 and 8 chan pull off PER DAY now? How many people in the movement has KiwiFarms doxxed? How many charismatic young leaders from our side were stopped in their tracks, before they could blossom into the leaders we needed to take this to the top? I know literally dozens of people who have *PTSD* from this “online harassment”, including myself. Over the past ten years, I have seen thousands of attacks and tried to personally help over 100 victims, in addition to funding these anti-terrorism efforts.
The impact has been not only enormous but extreme. And we haven’t taken the time to truly think about this cumulatively.
How are we even supposed to begin to reason about this? 4chan launched in 2003; it has been almost 20 fucking years of that bullshit; it gets over 22 million views a month now. How many years was Reddit, daily, sending thousands of people out to attack on orders and on a consistent agenda of stomping any movement from the left, beginning with women in tech and gaming and growing from there? I don’t know how to even go about putting together a list of the number of people attacked and the attacks that occurred; myself and other people I know involved in this type of work, were sometimes attacked over and over and over. I have sustained at least 10 major attacks on me alone since I started doing this work. Some are among the worst things to ever happen to me, and I’m a pedophile victim.
I don’t know, what do you say, how many attacks do you think were conducted each day from 4chan alone? Over 10 years? Regardless of how you look at it, we’re talking about tens of thousands of attacks on people, more, more, more. How many? I need to know!! What did it do to our people? Were their reputations ruined so they couldn’t get anywhere? Did they quit the movement (many did)? Did they give up organizing duties, especially when they weren’t supported by their supposed comrades, because its “internet harassment”? How many took down their work, went offline, were severed from their communities, stopped in the middle of significant activist trajectories? What was the cost of this to us? And what WILL be the cost of it coming back stronger than ever before with the now EXPLICIT and PUBLIC backing of the tech industry’s top fascists, the richest and most powerful people in the world?
These attacks have incalculably reduced us. For one, we have been living under serious and incredible fear. Literally everyone on the left knows that if you draw the attentions of these hoards, they can devastate your life within days or even hours; there’s no way to stop it, and when it happens, everyone just wants to be as far from the fall out as possible, even the people who claimed to be your allies and EVEN the people who claim to know things about online harassment. That’s how this works.
This shit ruined lives. These are just the latest incarnations of the terrorism that fascists have always heaped on political opponents; there is not much new about them at all except for they have been updated to apply in an environment where the internet exists.
I think we need to start reckoning of what the legacy of those attacks has been, as we move into a new political era marked by the fall of Roe v Wade, the extinguishment of the Defund the Police movement, and the end of “women in tech” (they’re all being laid off right now). We need to reckon with it QUICK, because we are entering the reign of the Shadow Movement, as Musk and other technofascists give the attack orders… in public this time. The tables have turned; we will be the ones fighting in the shadows now.
We were not attacking them… at all. So as they brutalized, culled, trimmed down, terrorized, our side? Theirs was healthy, ours posed no meaningful threat, theirs was growing. As our side grew weaker and weaker, being drained at every step; we weren’t even defending ourselves outside of yet more op eds; they were getting stronger. We are so weak now.
Now, the Shadow Movement is positioned to enjoy more latitude than ever before, now that Elon Musk, as part of the ongoing PayPal Mafia + a16z conspiracies, is working to create a Twitter world where these gangs are allowed to openly attack using previously-denied strategies; there will be no more permabans, far less limitations on behavior and less limitations on new account registration… it will be easier than ever for them to get people off the internet; they have the explicit support of the tech elite; then again, they always have, we just weren’t paying enough attention.
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO THIS TIME THAT IS DIFFERENT. WHAT ARE WE DOING TO PREPARE FOR THIS? THEY ARE ABOUT TO FUCKING CREAM US AGAIN AND WE ARE ALREADY ON OUR KNEES. HAVING A LEFT THIS WEAK IS INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS AND TO SEE FASCISTS ACCELERATING WHILE THE LEFT GROWS MORE IMPOTENT IS A RECIPE FOR MASS DEATH. THIS TERRORISM RUINS MOVEMENTS AND CREATES MASS SHOOTINGS. IT IS GOING TO GET WORSE THAN EVER BEFORE.
We have to fight this as it is, as a fascist mob, as a Shadow Movement emerging from the tech industry which has been crushing us slowly and inexorably; attacks that these people conducted in the 2013-2016 halcyon days of this harassment, still affect people to this day. It is the type of attack that is designed to take people out of the game for good. And it does. People are doing great work and then all of the sudden there at 1000 people harassing them in one massive strike; then they’re sending you pictures of your kids hanging from a streetlight, and they hacked your email and sent nudes to your boss, and for the rest of your life, you’re gonna have to explain to jobs you apply for what 8chan is and why they posted that about you.
It is my personal belief that the Shadow Movement is one of maybe 3 top causes why all of our movements died. We need to figure out what we are going to do this time because there are no movements left to protect us — they already killed them. This is an emergency, they are going to kill us next.