American dissidents of all stripes are ablaze with anger after The Washington Post’s most repugnant reporter, Taylor Lorenz, published yet another piece trying to ruin someone more popular than her.
Taylor Lorenz, a Washington Post columnist, wrote a Tuesday article titled, “Meet the woman behind Libs of TikTok, secretly fueling the right’s outrage machine,” revealing the identity of the user who had intended to remain anonymous. The piece linked the user’s real estate page listing her full name and home address, which the outlet later removed.
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The account, which nearly has 700,000 followers, posts TikTok videos of liberals in order to spark a reaction among conservative audiences.
Lorenz reportedly contacted Libs of TikTok early Tuesday telling the account they are “being implicated as a hate campaign against LGBTQ people,” the account said. [Daily Caller]
For those not paying attention, the blazing hot Libs of TikTok account simply finds TikTok videos wherein crazed liberals and LGBTQ-ers, many of them teachers of innocent children, unabashedly reveal their deviant grooming agenda for public consumption.
For instance:
Few people are more repugnant than Taylor Lorenz, who once falsely accused billionaire Marc Andreeson of using the “r-slur” in a Clubhouse room, and whose age is humorously difficult to pin down. Mere weeks ago, Lorenz had a meltdown over “online harassment” in an interview with MSNBC, then pressured the channel into deleting the interview.
Lorenz may be repulsive, to say the least. She certainly courted, assiduously, all the hatred coming her way. But there is a bigger story here. This incident is a case study in how the ruling regime uses cutout “NGOs” and “hackers” to target dissidents for annihilation. It wasn’t Taylor Lorenz who doxed Libs of TikTok. Lorenz is a used-up cocktail waitress for the regime. She’s far too talentless to achieve such a feat. Instead, it was a motley crew of regime actors.
The original doxer of the woman behind Libs of TikTok was an Antifa Twitter user named @karmaonesixone who gloated last weekend about using sleuth work to uncover the account’s original tweets and name.
Another Twitter user, Travis Brown, promoted and confirmed @karmaonesixone’s work, then went on to unearth and reveal even more information about the woman behind LibsofTikTok.
In the Washington Post, Taylor Lorenz herself credits Brown for confirming Libs Of TikTok’s identity.
On Saturday, software developer Travis Brown (who is working on a project with support from Prototype Fund, an organization that backs open-source projects) unearthed the account’s Twitter history and posted a thread detailing information about its profile changes.
Who is Travis Brown? In essence, a man paid by the German government to target, dox, and harass the international left’s ideological enemies.
Brown is the creator of the so-called “Hate Speech Tracker,” a program whose explicit purpose is to aid Antifa extremists in tracking and archiving statements by its enemies, and find “connections” between them to aid in doxxing.
WHAT SOCIETAL CHALLENGE DOES YOUR PROTOTYPE ADDRESS?
Many right-wing extremist movements are currently developing on social media, e.g. B. GamerGate, conspiracy theory movements like QAnon and militant movements like the Proud Boys in the USA. Members of these movements often delete their content, change their username, and get banned (often temporarily) from social media platforms. This makes it harder to resist their actions. For example, prominent far-right accounts on Twitter and Facebook have developed a well-documented pattern of distributing controversial and extremist content to their followers and then deleting it before moderators have a chance to respond. This is how they radicalize their audience while minimizing the risk of their platforms losing funding or moderate supporters. Archiving is an important element in counteracting this behavior and in many cases has led to prominent victories against the extreme right.
The Hate Speech Tracker is a set of composable software tools that enable people affected by harassment and hate speech on social media to record and share information about their experiences. Blacklists for Twitter and other social media platforms can be commented on and shared privately, connections between extremist-run accounts can be identified and cases of hate speech can be archived.
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WHO IS YOUR TOOL AIMED AT?
The early versions of this project were mainly used by anti-fascist researchers and organizations. Although these specialists represent the primary user group of the project, the tools should also be available to a broader, less specialized user base.
For those wondering, Brown’s work egregiously violates the terms of use of the sites that he tracks “hate” on. As Brown himself noted on his website, Twitter’s own privacy policy states:
“As such, we prohibit the use of Twitter data in any way that would be inconsistent with people’s reasonable expectations of privacy. By building on the Twitter API or accessing Twitter Content, you have a special role to play in safeguarding this commitment, most importantly by respecting people’s privacy and providing them with transparency and control over how their data is used.”
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“We want people to feel comfortable to create a separate and, if they choose, pseudonymous identity on Twitter. If you intend to associate any information about a Twitter user with an off-Twitter identifier, we require that you get express, opt-in consent from the user before making the association.
For example, you could get this consent if the user shares their Twitter handle directly with you as part of a signup process for your service. In situations in which you do not have a user’s express, opt-in consent to link their Twitter identity to an off-Twitter identifier, we require that any connection you draw be based only on information that a user would reasonably expect to be used for that purpose. If a user would be surprised to learn that you are using information they provided to link their Twitter account to an identity off of Twitter, don’t do it.”
Brown also openly admits to using certain tactics on Twitter that “probably” violate the ToS.
This isn’t some one-off fluke. Much like Brandy Zadrozny, whom Revolver profiled in 2020, Travis Brown exists as a small part of a much larger ecosystem.
Brown’s doxxing operation isn’t an independent venture. He is backed by the Prototype Fund, a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, an “independent not-for-profit organization.” The notion that the foundation is “independent” is, of course, a lie. OKFG receives funding directly from the the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
In other words, the German government directly financed the doxing of Libs Of TikTok and Taylor Lorenz’s calculated attempt on behalf of the Washington Post to destroy her life.
Prototype, by the way, doesn’t just fund doxing operations. It funds the mass arrival of “asylum-seekers” into Europe.
It backs the perpetual post-2016 campaign against “fake news.”
Is there something about “trans voices”? You bet there’s something about trans voices!
The same organization that paid to dox Libs Of TikTok is also paying to teach male-to-female transgenders how not to sound like Barry White.
Prototype doesn’t limit itself to online flame wars. It also takes an interest in real wars, funding an archive to gather alleged eyewitness reports of atrocities in the Syrian Civil War.
“Syrian Archive” acts vague about what position it takes on the war, but its website leaves no room for doubt: This is an organization that exists to blame Bashar Assad, and by extension Russia, for chemical attacks (chemical attacks that in at least one case turned out to be a hoax). In fact, its anti-Russia orientation is so obvious that in the last few weeks it has pivoted to warning about imminent chemical attacks in Ukraine:
The same German government-backed organization that is targeting political dissidents in the West is also funding the transgender mania and the foreign policy priorities of the Western elite. In many ways, Prototype resembles Bellingcat—an “NGO” funded by the United Kingdom that played a key role in amplifying the Russia collusion narrative, targets “far-right” domestic dissidents, and promoted the Syria gas attack hoax. In 2021, The Grayzone revealed that Bellingcat took UK intelligence money to run overseas influence operations intended to “weaken Russia.”
America unsurprisingly loves this tactic as well. In February, the hacker collective Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) leaked hacked materials from GiveSendGo that doxed donors to the Canadian trucker convoy. As we previously observed, DDoS is basically a de facto government operation:
In 2020, the Trump Department of Homeland Security claimed that DDoS is a “criminal hacker group.” Despite that, it enjoys IRS non-profit status. DDoS’s high-profile hacks have, almost without exception, targeted domestic dissidents against the regime, or its international enemies, rather than the regime itself. Besides doxing every GiveSendGo donor, DDoS’s other targets include Gab, Parler, local police departments, Russia, Myanmar, and right-wing chat groups online.
So much for speaking truth to power. By all accounts, DDoS speaks power to truth.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, DDoS’s leader is the “chronically ill” “they/she” transgender freak show Emma Best. DDoS almost certainly works hand in hand with serious criminals, if it is not an outright criminal organization itself. Yet nobody is shutting down financial support for DDoS or seizing its assets. While Julian Assange awaits trial and, in all likelihood, life in prison for embarrassing the security state and the Hillary Clinton campaign, “Emma” Best (they/she) faces no serious efforts to stop his activities whatsoever. And why would he? He is among the most heroic tranissaries rendering an invaluable service to the Globalist American Empire.
The actual hacker who claims credit for hacking GiveSendGo is Aubrey Cottle, who is the co-founder of the old “Anonymous” hacking collective.
In late February, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Hillary Clinton called for Anonymous and other hacker groups to launch more cyberattacks on Russia. Does anybody think for even a moment that the CIA and other agencies aren’t “encouraging” such behavior behind the scenes?
This isn’t a new idea. Back in 2013, Anonymous carried out operations against the Assad government in Syria.
So, what’s the takeaway from all this? When you see such “hacker groups” operate, they are not operating independently. They exist within an ecosystem where regime stakeholders can use cut-outs to do their dirty work. During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the merc–, ahem, private military contractor Blackwater served a similar function for combat zones: Flexibility and plausible deniability. Now, the same goes for civil society. Nominally, the U.S. Constitution and the constitutions of its allies protect freedom of speech, and the government explicitly doxing its own citizens for dissent is unlikely to be popular. Rather than have government employees directly target dissidents (which does happen on occasion), it is much easier to quietly enable cutout “civil society organizations,” NGOs, and more — all funded by government yet insulated from any kind of accountability — to do the dirty work.
The Lorenz dox job exposes how this ecology operates. This is not simply the story of a deranged attention whore who went too far. This is a story of how the new Stasi operates: Energy flows from governments, to non-profits, to hackers, and finally to aged out journalists publishing hit pieces on dissidents in Jeff Bezos’s paper of record.
By understanding this system, it becomes possible to stop it. The most obvious fix is the most blunt: Break off the billions in government funding that enable these shadow operations of left-wing radicalism. But that isn’t the only fix. Revolver will further explore this NGO ecosystem in the weeks and months to come. Stay tuned.
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