Starting on November 6, numerous predominantly Black organizers, activists, and students across multiple states began receiving text messages with racist content telling them to report to their “nearest plantation” site. The texts came from various area codes, and were sent to recipients in at least Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Virginia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Ohio, and Alabama at the time of this report. These texts have since been widely reported to law enforcement. The VA Attorney General’s office has publicly confirmed they, and the FBI, are aware of the incidents. The language in the text messages appears to have originated from racist right-wing imageboards, including 4chan, as well as shared on a subreddit that has since been removed by Reddit moderators. An individual or individuals likely copy-pasted the text and used virtual phone numbers to send out the texts, selecting recipients based on their demographic profile. The recipient phone numbers could have been obtained via a data broker or a pre-existing data breach. We assess the security risk to individuals receiving the text messages is low, given the absence of additional personally identifiable information (PII) – such as recipients’ addresses – contained in the messages.
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