US law enforcement is investigating anti-black mob documents after the election
Several federal and state agencies in the United States are investigating how racist texts were sent to black people across the country after this week’s presidential election.
Text messages asking for slavery were sent to Black men, women and children, prompting inquiries by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
Anonymous messages have been reported in several states, including New York, Alabama, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Tennessee. The FBI said it had contacted the Justice Department about the messages, and the Federal Communications Commission said it was investigating along with state and federal law enforcement.
“These messages are unacceptable,” FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. He said the agency takes “this type of identification very seriously.”
Racist letters about ‘cotton picking,’ ‘plantations’ and ‘slave holders’ were sent to black people in at least 20 US states shortly after the presidential election. The Trump campaign denies any involvement. The FBI and the Department of Justice are investigating.
Although the documents differed somewhat, they all instructed recipients to “get on a bus” that would take them to a “farm” to work as slaves, officials said. They said that these messages are being sent to school children and college students, which has caused a lot of distress.
Whoever sent the messages used a VPN to hide their origin, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said Thursday morning. Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown said his office has received numerous reports of racist messages being sent to black people, including children.
Officials said the messages appear to be part of a national campaign targeting black people after the election.
Brown said in an interview that it was disturbing that children were targeted, sometimes by name, in many articles that often rely on data sets collected from adults, such as campaign donors or magazine subscribers.
“This is an intimidating and intimidating use of technology” that may have violated multiple laws, Brown said.
He said investigators will use “every tool and resource available to us to answer whoever made these messages.”
Accounts are disabled
Phone service provider TextNow said “one or more of our accounts” were used to send racist messages and immediately suspended those accounts for violating its terms of service.
“As part of our investigation into these messages, we discovered that they were sent by multiple carriers in the US and we are working with our partners and law enforcement to investigate this attack,” the Canadian company said in a statement on Friday. .
This week’s issue: Donald Trump returns to the White House, but is the Liberal government ready for the unexpected? Political lessons from the defeat of Kamala Harris. Also, Canada closes TikTok offices due to security concerns.
Major carriers AT&T and Verizon both said it was an industry-wide problem and forwarded comments Friday to CTIA, the wireless communications trade group.
The U.S. wireless industry has been working in recent days to block thousands of texts and numbers it sends, CTIA spokesman Nick Ludlum said. The industry group’s initiative is working with law enforcement and “identifying the platform that bad actors are using to send these messages,” he said.
‘Slap in the face’
Nicole, a North Carolina mother who asked not to use her last name because of her work, said she was disturbed and concerned by the messages her high school daughter showed Thursday night. The texts instructed him to prepare to return to the fields.
“It’s like being slapped and showing me that it’s still an issue that hasn’t changed at all,” he said.
Nicole said her daughter didn’t say much after the text, she deleted the message and went to sleep. Nicole said she needs to sit down and think about her feelings. He said this situation is so shocking that it is unheard of, and he felt sad for his daughter.
“He has many friends of different races. He is the one who is blind and does not see the difference. So, I feel that I love him, it really showed him that everyone is not like him,” said Nicole. “Racism is still very prominent in our country right now.”
Several students at historically Black colleges are getting a message with the same tone but different words. Robert Greene II, an assistant professor of history at Claflin University in South Carolina, said he thinks not only is the timing of this mass messaging deliberate, but also its focus on young Black students.
“It’s a way of saying, especially to Black college students, that this is the world they’re living in now, that this kind of racist intimidation is coming back into the mainstream of American society and American politics,” Greene said.
How did they do it?
Those responsible for sending messages have taken advantage of the mass messaging industry designed to help legitimate advertisers reach people on their phones.
“This is now the primary way most Americans will communicate,” said Cori Faklaris, an assistant professor of software and information systems at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “So people who need advertising or marketing services, go where the people are.
“Unfortunately, the naysayers and haters are also following.”
Faklaris said that criminals are likely to use the collection of personal data that can be bought cheaply in other corners of the Internet. When combined with other data, such as residences or previous purchases, Faklaris said it may be easier to use machine learning algorithms to gain demographic information.
“All of this means that it may be easier than most people realize to make a really good guess about the race or nationality of the person connected to that phone number,” he said.
Unlike email or social media, the US regulates text messaging as a medium and tries to be neutral about the content shared via text. Because of this, there is less filtering that could prevent the spread of racist messages this week, Faklaris said. There is no standard system in the US to flag documents as suspicious or unwanted before they are viewed, he said.
But after the explosion of instant messaging scams during the pandemic, Faklaris said law enforcement has developed better investigative tools and it should be “easier for authorities to track these attacks.”
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