Far-Right Message Boards Threaten Fulton County Grand Jurors

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Far-Right Message Boards Threaten Fulton County Grand Jurors

Fulton County Courthouse

Users on far-right message boards are targeting the Fulton County, Georgia, grand jurors who voted to indict former President Donald Trump, including supposedly doxxing their addresses, threatening them with violence, and digging up their supposed online presences.

On August 14, Trump and 18 others were indicted “over their efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss” in Georgia, “with prosecutors using a statute normally associated with mobsters to accuse the former president, lawyers and other aides of a ‘criminal enterprise’ to keep him in power.” The grand jurors who indicted Trump were named in the indictment, per state law.

A Media Matters review found that following the release of the indictment and the grand jurors’ names, users on far-right message boards began targeting them in retaliation.

On a message board that has been the home of “Q,” the central figure of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a user posted the names of the jurors alongside their supposed addresses (Media Matters has blurred the supposed doxxing to protect the jurors, and has chosen to blur and remove other material posted by message board users). And on another message board, where the QAnon conspiracy theory initially emerged, a user seemed to threaten to “follow these people home and photograph their faces.”

Other users on the message boards also issued direct threats against the jurors. One user wrote that the grand jurors’ names was a “hit list” to which another user responded, “Based. Godspeed anons, you have all the long range rifles in the world,” while another wrote that they were “about ready to go Turner Diaries on these treasonous n***** fucks” (referring to a violent white nationalist book). And another user ominously wrote that the jurors were “committing election interference” and so they “should indeed be careful.”

Additionally, message board users tried to dig into the jurors’ online presences and backgrounds, posting images of jurors’ supposed Facebook and LinkedIn pages as evidence that they were biased against Trump and posting a link to their supposed political contributions pages from the Federal Election Commission. (According to The Washington Post, “several of the jurors disabled their profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook.“) Users also tried to determine the ethnic and religious backgrounds of the jurors.

Outside of the message boards, users on right-wing social media platforms like Truth Social and GETTR also tried to dig into the jurors’ backgrounds.

The supposed doxxing and targeting of these grand jurors comes after users of these far-right message boards have repeatedly targeted entities and figures with troll campaigns, harassment, and death threats.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

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