Social media has wrongly identified a Cincinnati, Ohio teenager as the high school student who engaged in a confrontation with a Native American protester, leading to a slew of online attacks.
Michael Hodge and his family were subject to threats after being doxxed — having personal information shared online — according to his older brother, Andrew Hodge. According to a Sunday Twitter thread by Andrew Hodge, members of his family were harassed and spammed with “threats of physical violence” after their parents’ address got posted online.
“My parents, uncles, & aunts, receive messages stating they are pieces of shit parents and won’t be able to protect #MichaelHodge forever… seriously what kind of behavior is this?” Hodge wrote.
4) My parents, uncles, & aunts, receive messages stating they are pieces of shit parents and won’t be able to protect #MichaelHodge forever… seriously what kind of behavior is this?
— Andrew Hodge (@PikePlaceTechie) January 20, 2019
Hodge questioned if people had nothing better to do with their Saturday than “scour the internet for drama & then dig up info on a family & rile up an army to attack them.”
A video went viral over the weekend that show a student from Kentucky’s Covington Catholic High School, Nick Sandmann, smiling and standing in front of a Native American man banging a drum during the Indigenous Peoples March. Sandmann and fellow students were in Washington to participate in the March for Life rally earlier in the day.
Media coverage of the event originally portrayed the students, some wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, as taunting and intimidating the Native American elder.
A longer version of the video posted later showed the man, Vietnam War veteran, Nathan Phillips, actually approached the group of students banging on his drum.
The updated version of events led to a series of media walk-backs over portrayal of the weekend episode.
