Racism WatchDog

About

Racism WatchDog is a Twitter that searches out racist or bigoted tweets and retweets them, commenting on each with a series of "woofs." The purpose of the account is to call attention to the potentially offensive tweets by people in media.

Online History

On November 11th, 2017, the Twitter account @RacismWatchdog launched.^[1] The following day, the account responded to a post by the Twitter account for Dunnellon, Florida radio station WDLN, who tweeted, "Now this is not really fair. It has only been 1 year and Obama got to blame Bush for 8 years. Must be affirmitave action." The Racism WatchDog responded, "WOOF."

Over the next few weeks, the account grew in popularity. Within eight months, the account has received more than 511,000 followers. On May 22nd, 2018, Racism WatchDog responded^[2] to a post by Paul Joseph Watson. The post (shown below, left) received more than 19,000 retweets and 87,000 likes.

On June 14th, the creators of the account tweeted^[3][4] that they would be accepting donations for the Southern Poverty Law Center (shown below, right). They wrote, "After seeing some pushback on the Patreon tweet, we've decided to remove it and continue the account as it was previously. As always, our site is open for donations to the @splcenter at http://racism.dog. Funds raised will be donated at the end of each month."

Criticism

On June 11th, 2018, the creators of the Racism Watchdog explained that they have received some backlash for the account.^[5] They said in an interview:

"Yeah, there has been, but nothing too serious. A lot of the time people we quote just block us and that’s that, maybe leaving a snarky message like Ben Garrison did. A big outlet for backlash has been through people setting up racist parody or copydog accounts– for example, there is a Racism WatchDog account that has the same bio and avi (avatar) as our bio, that just barks at our tweets. The best account I’ve seen was the WatchDog WatchDog, who barks at all the new WatchDog accounts -- it’s meta. Back to the original question, most of the backlash comes from dismissal and mockery, for example, one of our tweets got to the top of r/cringeanarchy on Reddit, but we do get occasional DMs to the @RacismDog saying 'kill yourself,' which I think is funny because people are telling a dog on the internet to kill itself. The same thing goes for people who try to argue with the dog in a thread and only get “woof”s in return.

"My 'favorite' type of backlash is where people speculate about who we are, what we do, and/or why we run the account, for example a tweet from @_m0threloaded said, 'That racism watchdog spastic is definitely some anaemic white dude male feminist who rapes women and calls dogs ‘doggos'', none of which is accurate besides the doggo part– that tweet is like the unholy grail of bigotry. There are a lot of tweets like that out there and sometimes I can’t help but feel flattered that these pepe-the-frog avi dudes would spend their time making fanfiction about us and building up their own lore."

Twitter Break

On June 19th, @RacismDog tweeted "WOOF WOOF" at an ABC 7 News story about a black woman who said "I hate white people" while attacking bus passengers (shown below). In response, some Twitter users criticized the tweet, arguing that racism against white people did not exist due to the institutional power of whites.

Shortly after, Twitter user @trev_drinkwater^[9] posted a screenshot of the tweet with a reference to the Milkshake Duck meme. Also on June 19th, the @Racismdogowners Twitter feed announced they would be taking a break from the account, claiming "Running the account is an emotional labor that we’re not cut out to do every day. #selfcare is important." The #selfcare tweet was subsequently deleted and a follow-up tweet was posted with the message "Apparently saying that running an account where we receive threats isn't emotionally stressing, so I removed the tweet about self care." Additionally the account revealed that the owners were people of color and "talk about race frequently" on their "personal accounts."^[10]

That day, the webcomic (he he) Silly! published a comic featuring a dog who barks at racism who is euthanized for barking at someone saying "Yo fuck white people" (shown below). Within 24 hours, the tweet gained over 5,000 likes and 1,700 retweets.^[8]

Parodies

Horny Reply Watchgoose

On June 13th, 2018, the Twitter^[6] account Horny Reply Watchgoose (@ReplyGoose) launched. The account's bio reads, "We trained a goose to honk at horny mfs." Two days later, they responded to a tweet from Peter Daou (shown below), which received more than 340 retweets and 2,100 likes in less than 24 hours.

The account was started by Twitter user @VR0NLINE, who on June 7th proposed the idea to her followers (shown below).

Over the following several months, the account accumulated over 13,000 followers. Most of the account's tweets take screenshots of other users flirtatious replies to women (shown below, left), though sometimes the account will highlight overt sexual innuendo (shown below, right).

On August 15th, the Daily Dot^[11] published an interview with the creator, who stated “My main goal with the account when I started it was to try and show people what kind of stuff I was dealing with every day in my interactions on Twitter… Like I’ve had friends (straight guys mostly) who’ve told me that they had no idea how bad it was and how horny and weird people get until I started sharing my [replies] in like group DMs and stuff.”

Search Interest

External References