In the hours after President Trump won a second term last year, Americans nationwide started receiving hate-filled text messages taking aim at their race, gender, sexuality or religion.
Investigators are still trying to find the culprit. Within the digital communications industry, it was an existential crisis. Despite years of cracking down on spam, fraud and abuse, someone bypassed the guardrails on a mass scale.
Robert Greene II says his students were rattled on election night. The candidate that inspired so many of them, Vice President Kamala Harris, was clearly losing. After years of escalating dangerous rhetoric from Trump and his allies, the president was back. Students were already scared and unsettled, Greene said. Then they started getting disturbing text messages. This idea of lining up people to be put back into slavery - things like that.
But it wasn't just Claflin in the crosshairs. Each got a message tailored with threats about deportation, reeducation camps and slavery. It was a tidal wave of hate. Law enforcement is still trying to figure out who was behind the campaign nearly three months later, but for people in the mobile communication space, this attack was exactly the kind of thing they had been working to avoid.
NPR talked to nearly a dozen people involved in the industry to try and get to the bottom of how this racist mass text campaign might have happened. Companies like his - hundreds of them - are devoted to sending mass messages. That could be everything from facilitating an ad campaign to helping local officials warn residents about a blizzard.
