Black activists fear that their legitimate concerns about Democratic candidates for president in the 2020 primary are now being drowned out online by a spiraling argument about who is and isn’t fake.

Activists trying to spread information or opinions on Twitter about specific candidates have been shouted down by other activists who say the hashtags they’re using are overrun by bots, Russians, or trolls — a fight made only more complicated by the actual presence of bad actors across the platform.

“There are real black people criticizing these candidates rightfully, but there are also fake accounts out there just looking to take advantage of any tension they can find in the community,” Shireen Mitchell, the founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women, told BuzzFeed News.

Like others, she said she’s concerned that hysteria over bots could push conversations spurred by real activists aside. “Everybody is a ‘bot’ now and no one can have a real conversation,” she said.

Concerns about fraudulent social media accounts aren’t new — disinformation spread by trolls or foreign actors perforated the 2016 campaign. But black activists on Twitter are now on opposing sides of a fight about whether the early conversations and criticism of black candidates like Kamala Harris and Cory Booker have been driven by bad-faith trolls and foreign actors looking to sow discord while pretending to be black voters online.

Activists are worried social media companies have not done enough since 2016 to clean up their platforms and to authenticate real profiles, letting some movements get subsumed by fights over reality. They also say they fear that when the companies do start taking the threats seriously, they may silence real concerns in the process.

At the center of the current controversy is the American Descendants of Slaves (ADOS) movement, a nativist political movement founded by Antonio Moore and Yvette Carnell, who say they’ve been talking and posting about it since 2015. They say they’ve worked to advocate for black Americans who descend from enslaved people brought to the United States during the transatlantic slave trade.

As the presidential campaign begins, activists who follow the movement say they’ve worked to push black presidential candidates to embrace policy that would directly affect the lives of black voters who are American descendants of slavery. Some of that work has specifically targeted Harris for her prosecutorial record during her time as California’s attorney general and San Francisco’s district attorney.

Harris, who is the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, is not a descendant of American slaves, and ADOS activists have questioned if she understands what they say are their specific needs and concerns.

A group of women who have been working since 2014 to identify Twitter disinformation campaigns and trolls blackfishing — or fraudulently posing as black on the platform — say the ADOS hashtag has become a prime target for bad actors to hijack to spread criticism and disinformation about candidates in the same way that Russian trolls in 2016 posed as black Americans to exasperate real concerns about Hillary Clinton’s record and to astroturf existing social movements like Black Lives Matter.

“It’s not an all-encompassing group, but in our small communities, we started noticing these accounts purporting to be black, that’s where this started,” said I’Nasah Crockett, a black woman who has worked to identify accounts purporting to be black. “We saw it in GamerGate, we saw it in the 2015–2016 election cycle, and we’re seeing it again coming in another wave.”

Mitchell, who helped expose a concerted effort of trolls posing as black women on Twitter in 2014 under the YourSlipIsShowing hashtag, appeared on a segment of Joy-Ann Reid’s MSNBC show earlier this month to warn viewers of signs of a troll account during a segment called “How to spot a Russian bot on Twitter,” specifically calling out the ADOS movement.

“A lot of the ones that are pretending to be black people and black women in particular, who are focusing on black identity, have these aspects in the way they’re talking about language,” Mitchell said on the show.

“There’s a new hashtag and/or identity that’s in their bios called ADOS or DOS, which is standing for descendants of slaves,” she said. “It’s the indication that they are someone who is born as a descendant in the United States who’s representing black America and has the vernacular and the language that people would believe is someone who is a part of our community, who’s either debating about Kamala or debating about Booker because that’s who just announced, and saying ‘we know who’s black in America.’”