FBI, Justice Department investigating racist mass texts sent following the election

WASHINGTON (AP) — Several federal and state agencies are investigating how racist mass texts were sent to Black people across the country in the wake of the presidential election this week.

The text messages invoking slavery were sent to Black men, women and children, prompting inquiries by the FBI and other law enforcement departments.

The anonymously sent messages were reported in several states, including New York, Alabama, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Tennessee. The FBI said it has communicated with the Justice Department about the messages, and the Federal Communications Commission said it is investigating alongside federal and state law enforcement.

“These messages are unacceptable,” said a statement from FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel. She said the agency takes “this type of targeting very seriously.”

While the texts varied somewhat, they all instructed recipients to “board a bus” that would transport them to a “plantation” to work as slaves, officials said. They said the messages were sent to school-aged children and college students, causing significant distress.

Whoever sent the messages used a VPN to obscure their origin, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said Thursday morning.

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Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown said his office is fielding multiple reports of racist text messages being sent to Black residents, including children. Officials said the messages appear to be part of a nationwide campaign targeting Black people in the wake of the election.

“These messages are horrific, unacceptable, and will not be tolerated,” Brown said in a statement.

Brown said in an interview that it’s disturbing that children were targeted, sometimes by name, in mass texts that typically rely on datasets collected on adults, such as campaign donors or magazine subscribers.

“This is an intimidating, threatening use of technology” that likely violated multiple laws, Brown said. He said investigators will use “all the tools and resources available to us to hold accountable whoever is behind these text messages.”

Phone service provider TextNow said that “one or more of our accounts” were used to send the racist text messages and that it quickly disabled those accounts for violating its terms of service.

“As part of our investigation into these messages, we learned they have been sent through multiple carriers across the US and we are working with partners and law enforcement cooperatively to investigate this attack,” the Canada-based company said in a statement Friday.

Major providers AT&T and Verizon both said it was an industry-wide problem and referred comment Friday to the CTIA, a wireless communications trade group.

The U.S. wireless industry has been working in recent days to block thousands of the texts and the numbers sending them, said CTIA spokesperson Nick Ludlum. An industry group initiative is working with law enforcement and has “identified platforms bad actors used to send these messages,” he said.

These racist text messages span the entire country, predominately targeting Black Americans, and more specifically Black children as young as middle schoolers.

Nicole, a mother in North Carolina who asked not to use her last name because of her profession, said she was disturbed and concerned by the messages her high school daughter showed her Thursday night. The texts instructed her to get ready to go back to the plantation. This was her daughter’s first real experience with this type of racism, Nicole said, and as a parent she didn’t want to have to have these conversations with her kids.

“It’s like a slap in the face and it shows me that it is still an issue that has not changed at all,” she said.

Nicole said her daughter didn’t really say much after the text, deleted the message, and went to bed. As for Nicole, she said she had to sit and process her feelings. She said the situation was so shocking that it didn’t feel real, and she felt sad for her daughter.

“She has a lot of friends of different races. She’s the one that doesn’t see color and she doesn’t see a difference. So, I feel like for her, it really showed her that everyone isn’t like her,” Nicole said. “Racism is still a very prominent thing in our country right now.”

Nicole said that parents have to be vigilant, especially with older children, and have the tough conversations, even if you don’t want to or feel like you have to.

“Whatever way it makes your child feel, approach it with open arms and be very receptive to it and just take it day by day.”

Several historically Black college students received a message with a similar tone but varied wording. Dr. Robert Greene II, an assistant professor of history at Claflin University, said he heard stories from his students about it, as well as from campus officials. Greene said he thinks the timing of this mass messaging is not only intentional, but the focus on young Black students is as well.

“It’s a way to say to, especially Black college students, that this is the world they are now living in, that this kind of outright racist intimidation is coming back to the norm in American society and American politics,” Greene said. “No doubt about it, fear and intimidation are the heart of what’s going on with these text messages.”

This type of browbeating toward the Black community isn’t a new phenomenon. Physical violence was how intimidation was done in the early 1900s and around the time of World War II, it was done through suppressive methods like poll taxes, Greene said.

But what makes this time different is the form of communication and the introduction of technology makes this a more sinister tactic, he added.

“The technology that we take for granted, that brings us all together via the Internet, via social media, via cell phones, is now being used to also intimidate folks,” Greene said. “It does add to the atmosphere of fear and paranoia. Certainly, there’s that sense of, well, if they can text message me, how else can they get in touch with me? What else do they know about me personally?”

Those responsible for sending the messages took advantage of a bulk-messaging industry designed to help legitimate marketers reach people on their phones.

“This is the primary way now that most Americans will communicate,” said Cori Faklaris, an assistant professor of software and information services at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “So people who need to advertise or market services, they go where the people are. Unfortunately, the scammers and the haters also follow suit.”

Faklaris said they also likely made use of collections of personal data that can be bought relatively cheaply on some corners of the internet. When combined with other data, such as places of residence or past purchases, Faklaris said it can be easy to use machine-learning algorithms to infer demographic information.

“All of this means it might be easier than most people realize to make a really good guess about the race or ethnicity of the person attached to that phone number,” she said.

Unlike email or social media, the U.S. regulates text messages like a utility and tries to remain neutral about content shared via text. As a result, there’s little filtering that could have blocked this week’s spree of racist messages, Faklaris said. There’s no universal system in the U.S. to flag texts as suspicious or unwanted before they are viewed, she said.

But after an explosion of texting scams that accelerated during the pandemic, Faklaris said law enforcement agencies have developed better investigative tools and it should be “relatively easy for the authorities to trace this particular attack.”

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Matt O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island. Lea Skene in Baltimore contributed.