Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Black online advocacy group draws critics

- RUSSELL CONTRERAS

RIO RANCHO, N.M. — A group of Black scholars, activists and writers has launched a new project it says will combat misleading informatio­n online around voting, reparation­s and immigratio­n, supporters announced Friday.

The newly formed National Black Cultural Informatio­n Trust seeks to counter fake social media accounts and Twitter trolls that often discourage Black voters from participat­ing in elections or seek to turn Black voters against other communitie­s of color.

Jessica Ann Mitchell Aiwuyor, the project’s founder, said some accounts using the social media #ADOS hashtag — which stands for American Descendant­s of Slavery — have urged Black voters to skip the presidenti­al election and sent offensive tweets about Black immigrants.

Some accounts also use the hashtag to inflame supposed divisions between U.S. Blacks and Black immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America, Aiwuyor said.

The scholars say they also will be monitoring other hashtags like # Blexit, #BlacksForT­rump, #MAGA, and #WalkAway. The effort isn’t meant to silence groups that are behind any hashtag but counter “bad actors” who are using the hashtags to disseminat­e false informatio­n, Aiwuyor said.

“The disinforma­tion used to target Black communitie­s is cultural,” said Aiwuyor, an African American activist and scholar. “It’s cultural disinforma­tion, which uses cultural issues to infuse false informatio­n and cause confusion.”

The founders of ADOS say their movement is advocating for Black Americans to vote for down-ballot Democrats as well as the party’s presidenti­al nominee former Vice President Joe Biden if he offers “a more serious Black Agenda” and makes “a strong commitment to reparation­s.” They say they are not taking a stance for or against Biden even if he doesn’t meet those demands.

The founders also took issue with the National Black Cultural Informatio­n Trust on Twitter after the announceme­nt that the project would monitor the #ADOS hashtag for xenophobic comments and false informatio­n.

“Ms. Aiwuyor has mounted a smear campaign against our movement on Twitter and other platforms,” cofounder Yvette Carnell said in a statement. “The purpose of the ADOS movement is not to demean or in any way diminish our Black immigrant allies. But a large part of our mission is reparation­s in the U.S. and those reparation­s would go exclusivel­y to the families of the American Descendant­s of Slavery. Part of the process of reparation­s is specifying a distinctio­n that is based on lineage.”

Carnell also disputed any suggestion that their movement is spreading false informatio­n: “In fact our project is anchored in wealth data from universiti­es, the Federal Reserve and other sources. We use that data to measure not only the contributi­on of ADOS. But also to measure the plunder of the ADOS community from 1619 to today.”

Members of the National Black Cultural Informatio­n Trust plan to monitor social media posts and flag those spreading misleading and fake stories. They plan to use crowdsourc­ing, website tools that show if accounts have troll-like behavior, and scholars on standby to counter any claims about slavery or voting.

Through its website, the project will direct users to discussion­s and stories around Black voting and U.S. reparation supporters who reject xenophobic rhetoric and push coalition-building with Black immigrants and Latinos.

Amilcar Shabazz, a history and Africana Studies professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachuse­tts Amherst, said the heated debates on social media are similar to debates in the early 1900s between Black migrants and African Americans.

Jamaican- born Marcus Garvey and U.S.-born sociologis­t W. E. B. Du Bois often publicly argued over civil rights tactics that sometimes spilled over to their background.

“This has crystalliz­ed into something else,” Shabazz said. “We have a new generation of U.S.-born Black people who really want to direct this struggle around reparation­s.”

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States