Activists Use Online Sleuthing to Identify Violent White Supremacists in Charlottesville

The crowdsourcing invitation was quickly retweeted tens of thousands of times, and within hours some of the Citronella-scented white nationalists most prominent in press photos were identified. Some individuals were fingered by people who know them personally; others were ID’ed when clues from the Charlottesville photos were matched with images and information from social-media profiles.

Later on Saturday, pictures began to emerge depicting the weekend’s violent clashes—including a horrific and widely circulated photo of four white supremacists surrounding a black man on the ground, beating him with metal poles as others looked on. The confrontation lasted only a minute amid the chaos, and none of the men was arrested at the scene. The victim, Charlottesville resident Deandre Harris, was left with eight staples in his head, a broken wrist, and a chipped tooth.

In the wake of these bloodier pictures, a second wave of “digilante” sleuthing began. Most notably, on Twitter on Sunday, activist Shaun King sifted through other images from Charlottesville to find clearer shots of Harris’s assailants, then marshalled his 700,000-plus followers to identify them.

Within hours, King had apparently identified one man from the pictures: Daniel Borden of Mason, Ohio. King alleged that Borden’s face and neck moles, visible in his Facebook page, matched pictures taken at the Charlottesville protest. Borden has since deleted his Facebook profile.

King’s tweets also apparently identified an onlooker to the beating: Michael Tubbs, a member of the Florida chapter of the neo-confederate League of the South who has previously done time for plotting to bomb black and Jewish-owned businesses in Jacksonville, Florida. Other videos show Tubbs rallying and directing protesters around the area.

Several of the individuals named by social-media users have already begun to face consequences for their participation in the white-nationalist event. The first person identified by the @YesYoureRacist account, a man named Cole White, lost his job at a Berkeley, California, restaurant, resulting in this remarkable Washington Post headline: “Charlottesville white nationalist demonstrator loses job at libertarian hot dog shop.”

Another individual named by the @YesYoureRacist account, North Dakotan Peter Tefft, has been “repudiate[d]” by his family; in an open letter published on the website of the Forum newspaper, Tefft’s father wrote that his son “is not welcome at our family gatherings any longer. I pray my prodigal son will renounce his hateful beliefs and return home. Then and only then will I lay out the feast.”

And a young torch-wielder seen prominently yelling in photos from Charlottesville, identified by @YesYoureRacist as Peter Cvjetanovic, is facing calls for his expulsion and firing from the University of Nevada, Reno, where he reportedly is a student and employee. Cvjetanovic complained to reporters that the photo and press coverage have distorted his beliefs: “[B]eing pro-white doesn’t mean I’m anti-anyone else. As a white nationalist, I care for all people.”

Unsurprisingly, crowdsourced sleuthing can go awry. Before the driver who plowed into a crowd of counterprotesters was identified, alt-right activists spread a false rumor that the car had belonged to an “Anti-Trump druggie” from Michigan, a story that was picked up by far-right sites like Gateway Pundit. And the New York Times reported that a University of Arkansas engineering professor received death threats and had his home address published online after he was mistaken for a different bearded man at the alt-right rally who was wearing a university T-shirt.

The bloody weekend in Charlottesville does not mark the first time armchair web detectives have teamed up to identify the perpetrators of violence—nor the first time a target has been misidentified. In the best-known precedent, after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, users of Reddit and other websites believed they had found clues pointing to several individuals. Not only did the volunteer army of forensic photo analysts fail to identify the real terrorists, but their actions arguably stymied the official investigation.

It is unclear why most of the participants in last weekend’s rally chose not to disguise themselves—some of their white-nationalist forebears, such as the Ku Klux Klan, notoriously disguise themselves in cloaks and hoods—but the post-Charlottesville naming-and-shaming may lead to a change of tactics in future marches and rallies. (According to press reports, white nationalists are already planning sequel demonstrations across the country.)

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Monday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation would investigate the Charlottesville violence. A spokeswoman for the FBI’s Richmond office told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that she couldn’t comment on whether they would investigate crowdsourced evidence like King’s, but said that investigators would be looking at all information that’s available to them.

At a press conference Monday, two days after the violence that left one counterprotester dead, President Donald Trump pledged a response to “the horrific attack and violence that was witnessed by everyone.”

“To anyone who acted criminally in this weekend’s racist violence, you will be held fully accountable,” Trump said. “Justice will be delivered.”