CANADIAN TRIED TO RALLY A SIEGE ON OTTAWA

The day after the deadly siege in Washington D.C., a Canadian user on an alternative social media platform — where hard right users flocked after Facebook and Twitter started moderating misinformation — tried to muster an attack in Ottawa to overthrow the Canadian government, and posted a stream of assassination threats against politicians and public health figures.

Among those targeted were Prime Minister Justin Trudeau; Alberta Premier Jason Kenney; federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh; and Alberta's chief medical officer of health, Dr. Deena Hinshaw.

Also targeted were prominent Americans, including President Joe Biden; the face of the U.S. pandemic medical response, Dr. Anthony Fauci; Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates; and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The posts by a user of MeWe were flagged as supporting domestic terror-related activity by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an organization that tracks and documents extremist and terrorist communications.

MeWe said Thursday the user has now been banned.

The ban follows months of heated and violent posts calling for a long list of people to be killed, including health officials, over political decisions and COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.

The day after the U.S. Capitol building was ransacked by supporters of Donald Trump in an attempt to prevent Biden from replacing him as U.S. president, the user tried to rally people to Ottawa for a similar siege on Parliament.

“If we Canadians do not go in force and march to Ottowa (sic) and storm the government, physically take out and down the government, we are all slaves of China, socialism, and Communist Canada,” he said in one post saved by MEMRI.

He urged insurgents to come “fully ready” to force Trudeau out of office.

The user, who claims to have completed Grade 12 in his user profile, begged Canadians to “take off your mask” because “there is no such thing as a virus that is spreadable.”

Last month, he shared a post on the legal challenge of Alberta's COVID-19 restrictions by the Calgary-based Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms. The post featured a photograph of Kenney and Hinshaw. He added 16 handgun emojis and said they were “hated beyond hate.”

He posted several messages over months threatening Trudeau, saying he should be shot, and “die allready (sic)”, often accompanied by several handgun emojis. In one message he warned both Trudeau and Singh they were the “2 most wanted DEAD people in Canada.”

He posted on MeWe under the username Davil1 OSCP. He gives his location as Canada and says he is an “OSCP consultant.”

OSCP likely stands for “Offensive Security Certified Professional,” which is professional certification in ethical hacking, also known as “white hat” computer security that looks for holes in computer systems to help block them from malicious attacks. What appears to be one of two Facebook accounts for the same man uses hacker imagery and messages.

MeWe said that the user has been removed from its platform for violating its terms of service (TOS).

“MeWe's terms of service prohibits inciting violence, hate, harassment, bullying, illegal activity, etc.,” said David Westreich, a company spokesman.

“Due to recent rapid membership growth, the company is currently expanding its Trust and Safety Team and adding new tools to help moderators find and remove TOS-violators” in order to “stop known bad actors at the door and find them if they've gotten inside.”

When Facebook and Twitter cracked down on posts from former U.S. president Donald Trump, specifically for broadcasting false or misleading information about the U.S. election, many of his supporters flocked to other platforms, some specifically created to welcome radical and alternative views of users who felt unwelcome elsewhere, often referred to as alt-tech.

Unlike some platforms, MeWe was not designed as a haven for fringe or radical views, MeWe said. The corporate model was simply supporting privacy and opposing surveillance capitalism.

Westreich said MeWe “stands head and shoulders above the current social media giants,” because there is no newsfeed manipulation or ways for messages to be boosted beyond those choosing to read them.

“This prevents any information or opinion — false or true — from being broadly promoted. Members need to deliberately seek out information for themselves and cannot be targeted by others who wish to reach and manipulate their thoughts, purchase decisions, or votes,” Westreich said.