The street protests following last Friday's inauguration saw two headline-grabbing acts of public violence. In one, a masked protestor in Washington, DC punched white nationalist leader Richard Spencer in the head, before running away. In the other, a Trump supporter in Seattle shot an anti-fascist protester outside a Milo Yiannopoulos speech at the University of Washington. (The protester survived.) The shooter later turned himself into police, who released him without charging him with a crime, and without naming him.

Two acts of violence, committed by two men unknown to the public, separated by one key difference: The identity of Spencer's assailant is the subject of a $5,000 bounty on an eight-month-old crowd-sourced investigations site called WeSearchr that has become a hub for the often conspiratorial energies of the alt-right.

The model behind WeSearchr is simple: Staff or users post a bounty for "questions people want answered," users fund the bounties through the site, and successful bounties get paid. "Questions people want answered" so far include what is in Megyn Kelly's divorce records, "Are there satanic pedo tunnels under your walnut pizza kid's hangout spot?" and "Has [former Gawker media owner] Nick Denton committed financial crimes?" Just as often, the site crowd funds projects that don't reveal any new information, such as putting up a Pepe billboard in the Midwest or inviting Kathy Shelton — a rape victim whose attacker Hillary Clinton defended in court in Arkansas in the 1970s — to a presidential debate in October.



Internet citizen investigations aren't new, and it's well established that they can be parlous for their subjects. (Just last month, a man armed with an assault rifle entered a pizza parlor in Washington DC to look into the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory that it was the site of a child sex ring.) And now — in the context of a new administration that has already offered the media "alternative facts" and catered to news outlets that have published demonstrably false news — there's quite an opportunity for an explicitly pro-Trump, crowd-sourced information bounty service. The market for such information includes but is hardly limited to a new universe of Trump-loyal outlets that are in the process of creating a new reality.