A white supremacist group created a fake Twitter account, posed as the leftist Antifa movement and called for violence during the ongoing protests sweeping the nation, the social media giant said Monday.
“Tonight’s the night comrades,” the group tweeted on Sunday. “Tonight we say ‘f—- the city’ and we move into residential areas … the white hoods … and we take what’s ours.”
The tweet, which also featured an emoji of a black fist and a misspelled Black Lives Matter hashtag, has since been removed and the account was suspended for violating Twitter’s manipulation and spam policy.
The company identified the organization behind the fake account as Identity Evropa, which is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The racist organization was founded in Virginia in 2016 and focuses on recruiting white, college-aged men to “transform them into the fashionable new face of white nationalism,” according to the center.
Twitter has seen a wave of fake accounts spreading false information about the ongoing protests in recent days.
“We’re taking action proactively on any coordinated attempts to disrupt the public conversation around this issue,” the company said in a statement.
Antifa, short for “anti-fascist,” also made headlines this week after President Donald Trump vowed to designate the group as a “terrorist organization.” The self-styled radical movement is a network of multiple far-left militant groups that seeks to confront white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
Trump and his supporters have claimed, without evidence, that Antifa is behind the violence seen in some of the protests nationwide.
