With Charlottesville police making few arrests, and reports that they did very little to control the violence propagated by far-right protestors at this weekend’s Unite the Right Rally, Twitter activists, spearheaded in large part by the Twitter account “Yes You’re Racist” and NY Daily News writer Shaun King, are taking matters into their own hands.
Several photos of the two-day rally — which attracted Neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and other White supremacist hate groups — have gone viral with many Twitter users asking others on the social media platform to identify the men pictured.
So far, activists have appeared to uncover the identities of several men, some of whom were documented committing brutal assaults, including Cole White, Pete Tefft, Daniel Borden, Michael Ramos, and Peter Cvetanovic.
A few of these far right protestors are facing swift consequences, though not by the criminal justice system.
After some identified Cole White on the Yes You’re Racist account, his employer in Berkeley, California denounced his participation and spoke to him about his participating. White subsequently resigned, as the Los Angeles Times reports.
Daniel Borden, raised in a reportedly liberal family, has been disowned by his relatives, and Peter Cvetanovic has been pushed to the defensive after a photo of him bearing a torch and appearing to yell loudly on the first night of the rally had gone viral.
The University of Nevada, where Cvetanovic is a college student, denounced white supremacist movements, though it did not identify Cvetanovic by name. Some have shared an online petition to have him expelled.
The men identified who appear to have been involved in a vicious attack that left counter protester Deandre Harris bloodied and bruised have yet to be detained for their assault.
The Department of Justice and the FBI, however, plan to investigate a incident in which James Fields plowed into a group of Black Lives Matter and LGBT activists, killing paralegal Heather Heyer.