The Anonymous 'war' on Donald Trump is a complete disaster
The "total war" that Anonymous declared earlier this month against Donald Trump has quickly devolved into a civil war among hackers fighting within the group and pro-Trump supporters who are trolling them within their chat rooms.In early March, hackers affiliated with Anonymous tried to reboot their Operation Trump campaignby calling for everyone to take down Trump's websites in a coordinated effort on April 1. Almost immediately, the initiative was criticized by people within Anonymous as irresponsible and "cringeworthy," but a dedicated group apparently moved on with the plan.
It's April 1: Many of the GOP frontrunner's sites are still standing, there are now two competing OpTrump chat rooms with totally different missions, and one of them has been flooded with pro-Trump supporters and others leaving trolling comments like "Hitler did nothing wrong."
In short: The so-called war seems to be a complete disaster.
'A mess is happening'
It's unclear when the split between Anonymous factions occurred, but it seems to have happened sometime after a hacker named Beemsee, who has been leading the original OpTrump effort, released a new statement claiming that attacking Trump's websites was all a ruse for publicity around April Fools' Day.
"There is no DDoS," Beemsee and two other hackers wrote, using the acronym for a distributed denial-of-service attack, a tactic used to overload a website. "It's only purpose was to gain attention, which this Operation needs. ... the point of this Operation is not to attack Donald Trump. Instead, it is going to try to give citizens some insight."
Beemsee and their cohorts say in their statement that people should try and capture "the darker nature of Trump's supporters" and post it on social media sites with hashtags like #OpTrump and #Trump2016.
But a hacker called AnonymousLoyalist disagreed. In a competing statement, the hacker wrote that they moved to a "far more organized channel, which has already seen unsurprisingly large amounts of success." That channel is #OpTrump2016, but it was unclear exactly what that success boiled down to.
Andrew Harnik/AP
When Tech Insider viewed the #OpTrump2016 chat room on Friday, it was an unorganized mess. Most Anonymous chat rooms are moderated in some way, and people usually get kicked out for spamming or posting nonsense. But it appeared to be flooded with trolls intent on calling them children, "social justice warriors," and, more often than not, homophobic slurs.
"A mess is happening," wrote one user in #OpTrump, expressing a shared frustration among others in Beemsee's chat room.
http://www.businessinsider.com/anonymous-war-donald-trump-fail-2016-4