nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
Adam Rahuba, a former concert promoter, works part-time as a food-delivery driver and a DJ. At 38, he spent most of the past year staying on a friend’s couch in a small town north of Pittsburgh.
A Washington Post investigation found that Rahuba is also the anonymous figure behind a number of social media hoaxes — the most recent played out in Gettysburg on Independence Day — that have riled far-right extremists in recent years and repeatedly duped partisan media outlets.
Rahuba once claimed that activists were planning to desecrate a Confederate cemetery in Georgia, The Post found. He seeded rumors of an organized effort to report Trump supporters for supposed child abuse. And he promoted a purported grass-roots campaign to confiscate Americans’ guns.
These false claims circulated widely on social media and on Internet message boards. They were often amplified by right-wing commentators and covered as real news by media outlets such as Breitbart News and the Gateway Pundit.
The hoaxes, outlandish in their details, have spurred fringe groups of conspiracy-minded Americans to action by playing on partisan fears. They have led to highly combustible situations — attracting heavily armed militia members and far-right activists eager to protect values they think are under siege — as well as large mobilizations of police.
Since the election of President Trump, Rahuba’s hoaxes have focused on leveraging fears of antifa, loosely affiliated activists who oppose fascism and have sometimes embraced property damage and violent protest. His July 4 hoax, a purported burning of the American flag, was billed as an antifa event. Hundreds of counterprotesters, including skinheads, flocked to Gettysburg National Military Park to confront the nonexistent flag burners.
A Post examination of Rahuba’s activities provides a rare inside look at the work of a homegrown troll who uses social media to stoke partisan division. It shows that in an era of heightened sensitivity about disinformation campaigns carried out by foreign nations, bad-faith actors with far fewer resources can also manipulate public discourse and affect events in the real world.
A previous Post story raised questions about the identity of the person behind the Gettysburg deception. In response, several of Rahuba’s former acquaintances contacted reporters and said they suspected he operated Left Behind USA, the social media account that promoted the fake event. The Post examined dozens of accounts and websites, some linked to him by name and others used anonymously to promote hoaxes. Similarities in content, design and other details were apparent.
Post reporters located Rahuba last week at a friend’s apartment in Harmony Township, Pa., where he acknowledged in an interview that he was behind 13 aliases and social media accounts that promoted hoaxes as far back as 2013.
“I guess I’m outed,” he said.
Rahuba has a long history of provocative online commentary, including a website he created years ago that made light of 9/11. A self-described democratic socialist and supporter of former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Rahuba said he antagonizes far-right extremists mostly for his own amusement.
“I’ve found myself very annoyed with the rise of right-wing populism,” he said. “So I thought I’d do my own thing to push back against them.”
Rahuba laughed when asked whether he considered himself a member of antifa.
“I am antifa,” he said. “But I think you’re antifa as well … as is everybody with common sense. But as a part of an organized group? Absolutely not.”
Some of Rahuba’s hoaxes have taxed law enforcement agencies and put bystanders in danger. In Gettysburg this year, a local pastor wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt was surrounded by armed counterprotesters until officers accompanied him out of the park for his own safety. Three years ago, an armed man who went to Gettysburg in response to a purported flag burning Rahuba had promoted on Facebook accidentally shot himself in the leg with a revolver.
Rahuba dismissed concerns that his efforts had harmed people or put them at risk.
“The message here was that any idiot on the Internet can get a bunch of people to show up at a Union cemetery with a bunch of Confederate flags and Nazi tattoos on their necks that just make them look foolish,” he said.
He also had little sympathy for the man who shot himself. “There’s some comedic value to that happening,” Rahuba said.
Rahuba, a lifelong resident of the Pittsburgh area, said he began trolling in high school. Using a dial-up modem, he and a group of friends posed as a 12- or 13-year-old girl in online chat rooms to lure older men to meetings, he said. In his telling, the men arrived to find Rahuba and his friends mocking them.
“It made me realize that people will believe the most unrealistic nonsense on the Internet,” he said.
Rahuba’s hoaxes grew increasingly farcical in the following years, some succeeding even though the names of the accounts and pages purporting to promote them left little doubt as to their true purpose. One Facebook page was called “Trolling Trumpsters.”
Rahuba told The Post that he was responding to the far-right’s embrace of baseless conspiracy theories such as QAnon, which holds that Trump is secretly combating a ring of powerful sex predators in politics and elite circles.
“I see the QAnon lunatics getting riled up about things very easily, and … low-hanging fruit,” he said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/inve...ysburg-antifa-flag-burning-troll/?arc404=true
A Washington Post investigation found that Rahuba is also the anonymous figure behind a number of social media hoaxes — the most recent played out in Gettysburg on Independence Day — that have riled far-right extremists in recent years and repeatedly duped partisan media outlets.
Rahuba once claimed that activists were planning to desecrate a Confederate cemetery in Georgia, The Post found. He seeded rumors of an organized effort to report Trump supporters for supposed child abuse. And he promoted a purported grass-roots campaign to confiscate Americans’ guns.
These false claims circulated widely on social media and on Internet message boards. They were often amplified by right-wing commentators and covered as real news by media outlets such as Breitbart News and the Gateway Pundit.
The hoaxes, outlandish in their details, have spurred fringe groups of conspiracy-minded Americans to action by playing on partisan fears. They have led to highly combustible situations — attracting heavily armed militia members and far-right activists eager to protect values they think are under siege — as well as large mobilizations of police.
Since the election of President Trump, Rahuba’s hoaxes have focused on leveraging fears of antifa, loosely affiliated activists who oppose fascism and have sometimes embraced property damage and violent protest. His July 4 hoax, a purported burning of the American flag, was billed as an antifa event. Hundreds of counterprotesters, including skinheads, flocked to Gettysburg National Military Park to confront the nonexistent flag burners.
A Post examination of Rahuba’s activities provides a rare inside look at the work of a homegrown troll who uses social media to stoke partisan division. It shows that in an era of heightened sensitivity about disinformation campaigns carried out by foreign nations, bad-faith actors with far fewer resources can also manipulate public discourse and affect events in the real world.
A previous Post story raised questions about the identity of the person behind the Gettysburg deception. In response, several of Rahuba’s former acquaintances contacted reporters and said they suspected he operated Left Behind USA, the social media account that promoted the fake event. The Post examined dozens of accounts and websites, some linked to him by name and others used anonymously to promote hoaxes. Similarities in content, design and other details were apparent.
Post reporters located Rahuba last week at a friend’s apartment in Harmony Township, Pa., where he acknowledged in an interview that he was behind 13 aliases and social media accounts that promoted hoaxes as far back as 2013.
“I guess I’m outed,” he said.
Rahuba has a long history of provocative online commentary, including a website he created years ago that made light of 9/11. A self-described democratic socialist and supporter of former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Rahuba said he antagonizes far-right extremists mostly for his own amusement.
“I’ve found myself very annoyed with the rise of right-wing populism,” he said. “So I thought I’d do my own thing to push back against them.”
Rahuba laughed when asked whether he considered himself a member of antifa.
“I am antifa,” he said. “But I think you’re antifa as well … as is everybody with common sense. But as a part of an organized group? Absolutely not.”
Some of Rahuba’s hoaxes have taxed law enforcement agencies and put bystanders in danger. In Gettysburg this year, a local pastor wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt was surrounded by armed counterprotesters until officers accompanied him out of the park for his own safety. Three years ago, an armed man who went to Gettysburg in response to a purported flag burning Rahuba had promoted on Facebook accidentally shot himself in the leg with a revolver.
Rahuba dismissed concerns that his efforts had harmed people or put them at risk.
“The message here was that any idiot on the Internet can get a bunch of people to show up at a Union cemetery with a bunch of Confederate flags and Nazi tattoos on their necks that just make them look foolish,” he said.
He also had little sympathy for the man who shot himself. “There’s some comedic value to that happening,” Rahuba said.
Rahuba, a lifelong resident of the Pittsburgh area, said he began trolling in high school. Using a dial-up modem, he and a group of friends posed as a 12- or 13-year-old girl in online chat rooms to lure older men to meetings, he said. In his telling, the men arrived to find Rahuba and his friends mocking them.
“It made me realize that people will believe the most unrealistic nonsense on the Internet,” he said.
Rahuba’s hoaxes grew increasingly farcical in the following years, some succeeding even though the names of the accounts and pages purporting to promote them left little doubt as to their true purpose. One Facebook page was called “Trolling Trumpsters.”
Rahuba told The Post that he was responding to the far-right’s embrace of baseless conspiracy theories such as QAnon, which holds that Trump is secretly combating a ring of powerful sex predators in politics and elite circles.
“I see the QAnon lunatics getting riled up about things very easily, and … low-hanging fruit,” he said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/inve...ysburg-antifa-flag-burning-troll/?arc404=true
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