LogFAQs > #884878503

In the days since the Charlottesville rally and as white nationalists have been identified in photos on social media, white supremacists have fretted —often self-pityingly—about the risks posed by social media mobs bent on exposing their identities. In one forum thread on the Daily Stormer, which recently went dark after being cut off by both Google and GoDaddy, a user lamented that the peril of doxxing made attending a rally too scary for him. "The thought of getting outed as 'white supremacists' to our employers and possibly losing our jobs is a horrifying prospect," the user Ignatz wrote. If forced to choose between a rally, which could bring him unwanted exposure, or supporting his white family, he says he would choose the latter.

It isn't any safer for those doing the doxxing or identifying. Logan Smith, the Twitter user behind Yes You're Racist, had been helping reveal the identities of white supremacists at the Charlottesville Rally. Smith told the News and Observer that his reporting had led to death threats. "They have been threatening my family, too. The overall response of course has been 99 percent positive, but there's always that extremely small but extremely loud and extremely angry minority that bites back." Logan's account also tweeted photos that were misidentified.

Sometimes alt-righters doxx each other, which isn't a surprise to Hankes. "The alt right is a group of malignant contrarians so they're constantly bickering with each other," says Hankes. "Charlottesville was an outlier in many respects because of how coordinated they were, and how they kept infighting to a minimum."

When high-profile neo-Nazis are doxxed, it can have ramifications for the entire movement, especially if the information that's revealed about a member proves to be inconsistent with their publicly professed ideology. Mike Pienovich, the leader of the alt-right website "The Right Stuff" and the propagator of a podcast called "The Daily Shoah," was doxxed in an anonymous Medium post which also revealed that the virulent anti-semite had a Jewish wife. (The two have since separated.) He later urged his thousands of listeners to bring weapons to the Charlottesville rally.

Those in the movement who would dare to self-doxx are in the minority, though they exist. "Of course you're going to have some of those guys who are out there publishing under their own names like Richard Spencer, and there's constant arguments among the right wingers about whether everyone should [go public]," says Hankes. In the forums, one user struck a defiant tone after being doxxed, vowing "never to cuck out" despite public threats against them. "But, by and large, people are scared because of the exact same reasons you'd expect," says Hankes. "It's hard to get a job, hard to make a living, hard to have a normal social life when all your friends and family know you believe in ethnic cleansing."

He thinks that the articles about the rise of the alt-right obscures the fact that few would actually wish to be identified with the movement. "When you see those articles that say, 'We can come out of the shadows now and we don't have to hide our identities,' that's pure bluster. That's them trying to embolden their supporters or bring more people into the fold who would otherwise be casual observers or just stay away, because they're afraid of the consequences of being involved," he says.

"The truth is, they're terrified."