Above: An example of one of the phony videos released by the troll page “Boston Antfa”

In recent news, admins of the most popular anti-fascist Facebook pages “Boston antifa” were doxxed — exposing them to actually be alt-right trolls posing as anti-fascist activists and putting out false statements. The videos and posts on the page were very clearly designed to mock anti-fascist activists but that did not stop tens of thousands of Americans falling for the hoax despite the obvious warning signs. Their videos went viral with thousands of angry comments by people seemingly believing the page to be true. One example of a video claiming to include a statement by “Boston-Antifa” was shared by large pages on Facebook including a page called “Police the Police” which has 1.6 million likes.

Complicating things Fox News claimed they were interviewing an anti-fascist activist which was later exposed to be a troll. A project called ‘AntifaChecker’ which aims to expose fake anti-fascist accounts was interviewed by gizmodo.com and was quoted as saying that “as far as we know, there are zero legitimate organized Antifa groups in Boston”.

More hoaxes include fake accounts claiming that anti-fa promotes domestic violence , however this hoax campaign was so sloppy that even the BBC (who are often ignorant of online culture) managed to sense something was wrong. The story can be read by clicking the link below.

Every single day a new parody account, hoax, or more sinister attempt to trick people goes viral at the expense of anti-fascist activists and other left wing activists. A few days ago a hoax about a so called “anti-fascist manual” went viral claiming to be a secret manual that exposes what anti-fascist activists secretly want. Similar to the previous stories the manual was very clearly fake but this didn’t stop the posts about the supposed manual being shared by thousands of people who believed the story to be true. These forms of tactics are not new in the world of politics. During the civil rights era a hoax was spread in the form of the so called “Black Panther coloring book” which was supposedly created by the Black Panther Party to brainwash children. The coloring book had actually been created by the FBI and sent to the houses of white families in an attempt to scare them into fearing the Black Panther Party and other black civil rights groups. In Russia ultra-nationalists created a book titled “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” which was a literary forgery claiming to be a manual created by Jewish leaders. This dangerous literary forgery was used as teaching material in schools under Nazi Germany and spread throughout the United States when American millionaire Henry Ford published 500,000 copies of the document in the USA.

A page from the “Black Panther coloring book” which claimed to have been made by the Black Panther Party but was actually created by the FBI and sent to the homes of white families to scare white people into hating the black panthers.

It’s sad to see that sensible and rational adults and even mainstream media news outlets such as Fox News are too prone to believing that everything they read on the internet is true. These fake accounts have been mocked by people who are politically savvy and can see the obvious trolls but have been very effective in fooling people who already hate anti-fascist activists.