Nubian Awakening network visualizations

4chan trolls were posing as a Black Lives Matter activists on Twitter before the 2016 election.

This is blog # 5 in a series of blogs about 4chan trolling tactics during the 2016 election. View the entire series here.

“Demarcus Owens” aka NubianAwakening may have been one of the most successful 4chan trolls on Twitter. In just four months his account amassed 17,222 followers, tweeted 13,037 tweets and 22,385 favorites. NubianAwakening was a popular account, many of their tweets received huge engagement.

How did I find this account?

A post in an archived 4chan thread was my first clue. The troll realized he could tweet the Hillary memes they were making (in the well oiled meme machine using Clinton’s campaign style guide) and include the keywords “raising awareness” which would trigger an account called RaisingAwarenessBot to automatically retweet their tweet.

So I searched through tweets sent to Hillary Clinton’s account from NubianAwakening with the words “raising awareness” and found this tweet from July 9, 2016.

Early on NubianAwakening was getting very low engagement, they all were, but the RaisingAwarenessBot was one of 5 accounts that retweeted this tweet.

This troll used a photo from a dating website and altered it with some filters.

The account used the name Demarcus Owens.

At this point they were still figuring out how to gain followers and get retweets, some were having better luck than others but they shared tips:

Remember these fake accounts were trying to attract Black Lives Matter and Bernie fans, so they were posting “normie memes” and engaging with hashtags and accounts for that specific target audience.

Suggestions to RT themselves and not make chemtrail-looking memes.

Starting to figure things out. The 2nd post in this screenshot refers to Edward Bernays, the “father of public relations” and pushing memes to big accounts.

NubianAwakening’s interactions from July 4 to October 26, 2016

The following visualizations are all interactions with the Twitter account NubianAwakening from the date it opened, July 4, 2016 to its final tweet on October 26, 2016.

Nodes: 12,073 Edges: 24,665

Over time NubianAwakening’s account gained a huge following.

Filtered by degree range 50: 57 nodes, 219 edges

NubianAwakening went from minimal engagement in July to massive retweets for parody videos he made in August.

He also apparently submitted articles to this short-lived blog called “The Whim” which is offline now but the homepage is archived in the wayback machine. This is the first I’ve heard of The Whim but it appears as if anyone could submit an article from the website. “Soros-Funded Groups Behind Paid Protests at Trump Rallies” was the article submitted by NubianAwakening.

The Whim opened a Twitter account in May 2016 and stopped tweeting in October 2017.

Other 4chan trolls

I traced back some of the memes I knew originated from 4chan to a network of fake Twitter accounts, several used stolen profile pics and pretended to be BLM activists and/or Bernie fans against Hillary Clinton.

“James Testa” failed to “normify” his account properly as per instructions to add a photo so he wouldn’t look like a spam bot.

“Trevor B.” stole the photo of a young man named Kwasi Enin who was accepted to all 8 Ivy League colleges in 2014 and received some attention in the media.

“Dashnie Jackson” used a more generic profile photo. This account was opened on July 6, 2016 and tweeted until August 19, 2016.

“Da’vion Washington” used a stock image for his profile photo. This account was opened on July 4, 2016 and tweeted mostly from July to December 2016 although it tweeted 3 tweets in 2017. It’s final tweet in July 2017 was about Assassin’s Creed, a video game.

The account for “Da’wan Washington” was created on July 4, 2016 and tweeted 365 tweets in July and August 2016 then it stopped tweeting. His profile photo is actually Tremayne Perry, a financial manager from Atlanta, GA who was interviewed in a 2016 article in the Atlanta Journal.

There are likely many more fake BLM profiles on Twitter and across all social media platforms but we’re only halfway through this series so moving right along…

Next Up:

This is blog # 5 in a series of blogs about 4chan trolling tactics during the 2016 election. View the entire series here:

Update: February 2021 — @NubianAwakening has been suspended from twitter. You can find an archive of the account here.