On Tuesday, a Washington Post report unmasked the person behind Libs of TikTok, a wildly popular, right-wing social media account that often posts anti-LGBTQ content and peddles disinformation about Covid and the 2020 election.
According to the Post, a woman named Chaya Raichik operates the account, which has been labeled by progressive watchdog group Media Matters for America as Fox News’ “wire service for anti-LGBTQ attacks.”
As of Wednesday, she’s amassed more than 850,000 followers on Twitter, where she’s baselessly accused people of being “predators” or “groomers” for teaching about sex or LGBTQ identities. Her tweets and clips have been shared by prominent right-wing figures, including podcast host Joe Rogan, writer Glenn Greenwald and a slew of Fox News personalities such as Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters.
Some people — a teacher in Oklahoma, for example — said they’ve received death threats after being targeted on Raichik’s account.
As the Post noted, Raichik anonymously posting from the Libs of TikTok account fits a violent, right-wing trend:
The popularity of Libs of TikTok comes at a time when far-right communities across the Internet have begun doxing school officials and calling for their execution. Parents of LGBTQ youth have been driven out of their towns. Local school board members have reported death threats.
In this situation, I see two interwoven issues that pose a threat to American society.
First, social media makes it easy for hatemongers like Raichik to grift off of the anger they generate. According to the Post, Raichik’s anonymous tweets had previously solicited donations. In fact, just hours after the report dropped, the Libs of TikTok Twitter account pushed a new paid newsletter to its followers. This isn’t surprising: We know making money off of agitated people is essentially the social media business model.
Last year, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified that “Facebook knows that content that elicits an extreme reaction from you is more likely to get a click, a comment or a reshare.” She claimed that reaction drove the platform to present users with some offensive or unsettling posts to keep them engaged.
Technologists have noted that this model is used across social media — not just Facebook. I suspect Raichik is just as hateful as we think she is, but her toxic posts are likely also driven by an ability to cash in on social media. That’s something tech platforms need to combat.
There’s also the fundamental (and somehow more daunting) issue of conservatives being willing subjects to this grift. Regardless of what these people claim, there isn’t a liberal conspiracy to groom and prey upon children. In the media, we need to pay less attention to whether conservatives believe these and other right-wing lies and instead examine the reasons conservatives feel compelled to repeat them.
Like birtherism during the Obama era and QAnon in the Trump era, conservatives are ginning up wild theories to justify their illiberal attacks on marginalized people. The incestuous relationship between Libs of TikTok and Fox News shows how these lies proliferate. Exposing the puppeteer behind Libs of TikTok is an important reminder to anonymous hatemongers that they’re not as hidden as they might believe.
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Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.