Patreon Bans ‘Yes, You’re Racist’ Account After Doxing Innocent Charlottesville Marcher Lookalikes

Members of the Ku Klux Klan and others arrive for a rally July 8, 2017, calling for the pr
AFP
Charlie Nash

Patreon has banned the account of popular left-wing activist “Yes, You’re Racist” after it made errors while publicly exposing alleged attendees of the Charlottesville neo-Nazi march.

The account, which is run by activist Logan Smith, led an effort to publicly expose attendees at the Charlottesville white supremacist march last week, posting the private information of several people involved and vowing to “make them famous.”

The identification attempts inspired several others to become involved, including actress Jennifer Lawrence and journalist Kurt Eichenwald. However, several people with no links to the alt-right or the march were reportedly misidentified, doxed, and subsequently received death threats and abuse from left-wing activists.

https://www.facebook.com/JenniferLawrence/posts/10154627430071793

After the Yes, You’re Racist account encouraged its followers on Twitter to search out and expose those pictured at the Charlottesville march, medical researcher Kyle Quinn was quickly misidentified.

“A man at the rally had been photographed wearing an ‘Arkansas Engineering’ shirt, and the amateur investigators found a photo of Mr. Quinn that looked somewhat similar. They were both bearded and had similar builds,” reported The New York Times on Monday. “By internet frenzy standards, that was proof enough.”

The New York Times reported that he was “quickly flooded with vulgar messages” and faced a mob of people who “demanded he lose his job, accused him of racism and posted his home address on social networks,” forcing him and his wife to stay at another location.

“You have celebrities and hundreds of people doing no research online, not checking facts,” Quinn declared. “I’ve dedicated my life to helping all people, trying to improve health care and train the next generation of scientists, and this is potentially throwing a wrench in that.”

Twitter is still full of posts misidentifying Quinn as an attendee of the march.

Yes, You’re Racist, which boasted on its Patreon account about “creating problems for racist people,” also misidentified an attendee as Billy Roper, a white nationalist, but not one who attended the rally, and directed hate towards popular YouTuber Joey Salads by posting a picture of him in a Nazi armband, without explaining that it was from a “social experiment” video he had made months prior.

On top of the misidentifications, the account also seemingly encouraged violence towards attendees of the march, tweeting, “they should have pepper-sprayed you Nazi fucks the moment you showed up with your tiki torches and cosplay outfits.”

After Breitbart Tech asked Patreon about the Yes, You’re Racist account appearing to violate the platform’s terms of service, the account was removed from the site.

“We removed the creator, Yes, You’re Racist, from Patreon because of doxing violations,” the company told Breitbart Tech. “Patreon does not allow creators to use Patreon to fund the practice of doxing. We do not believe anyone should be doxed and take a strong stance against it, regardless of who is being doxed. Our Community Guidelines clearly prohibit it and say that any creator caught in the act of malicious doxing — or encouraging others to do so — may be banned from using Patreon.”

Twitter, however, refused to comment in an email to Breitbart Tech, declaring simply that the company does “not comment on individual accounts, for privacy and security reasons.”

Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.

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