I find it very interesting that over the course of irregular hours in the United States, a small handful of accounts--one of which looks to be using the name and profile picture of a black woman journalist--have started replying to comments about the Amy Chua story.

It happened very suddenly. None of the accounts follow each other (which would be an organic explanation for why the tweets ended up in the feed). They all follow a strange mishmash of people.

They often have usernames that suggest that they're moderate, but the people they follow include B*n Shapiro, Dilbert guy, et cetera.

The commentary includes things like tweeting angrily at the person's employer, demanding that they "look" at how the person is running smear campaigns against a woman of color.

For example, this account (which I have blocked) is using @SpeakPatrice's username and display photo, says in the bio to follow @SpeakPatrice, but is not, in fact, following @SpeakPatrice, which is somewhat suspicious.

That account says racially incendiary things, like labeling the anonymous student "BIPOC" and referring to Amy Chua, who is a woman of color, as "white adjacent."

While that account does NOT follow @SpeakPatrice, despite leaning heavily on her name, they do follow this fine list of people.

That particular account tweets absolutely vile racist nonsense all the time, and also retweets positive comments about critical race theory.

TL;DR, there are apparently fake accounts who are entering this campaign in a coordinated fashion, who are not who they claim to be, and are explicitly trying to make people feel uncomfortable enough to disengage with the material.

I don't know who these people are, or what their exact motive is, but I think we need to be aware that they aren't real.

(I reported the one account whose screenshot I shared above to Twitter for impersonating someone else, and if you have time, I hope you can too.)

In this case, it's easy to spot the bad actors because they're all showing up on two week old tweets en masse. But reminder, largely to myself, that they're out there all the time.

(Thanks to @Blackamazon for talking about this so exhaustively that I was able to recognize what was happening.)

Also thank you to the Yale students who have worked tirelessly to bring this issue to light, and who are also being bombarded.