Article: Why I've Put Triple Parentheses Around My (((Twitter Name)))

On Twitter, I've changed my displayed name to (((Rob Kall))) Why?

It turns out that white supremacist, Aryan American haters are using triple parentheses to identify people they believe are Jews, so they can be targeted for trolling and harassment.

It turns out that a lot of search engines ignore characters like parentheses marks. Try a search for ((( and nothing comes up. Here's what shows up in a twitter search:

Triple parentheses 'echo'
(Image by rob kall) Details DMCA

So, I saw a colleague with his name in triple parentheses

((Andrew Rasiej))) @ Rasiej

Andrew is co-founder and organizer of Personal Democracy Forum, my favorite conference, where brilliant leaders in tech, politics and activism come together to discuss technologies, issues, ideas and strategies for making government, the world, the civic universe and politics better and more effective. I was attending the 2016 meeting ( #PDF16 ) and saw his name with the triple parentheses. I'd read about how they were being used by neo-nazis, so I emailed him a link to this article on Triple Parentheses at Wikipedia on it. Here's the gist of the Wikipedia page:

Triple parentheses, also known as an (((echo))), are a symbol used to highlight the names of individuals of a Jewish background. The practice originated from the far-right blog The Right Stuff; the blog's editors have explained that the symbol is meant to symbolize that the historic actions of members of the Jewish faith had caused their surnames to "echo throughout history".^[1] The triple parentheses have been adopted as an online stigma by anti-semites, neo-Nazis, and white nationalists to identify individuals of Jewish background as targets for online harassment, such as Jewish journalists critical of 2016 U.S. presidential election candidate Donald Trump.^[2]^[3]
Use of the markup was brought to mainstream attention by an article posted by Mic in June 2016.^[2] The reports also led Google to pull a browser extension meant to automatically place the "echo" markup around Jewish names on web pages,^[2] and the markup being classified as a form of hate speech by the Anti-Defamation League.^[3] In the wake of these actions, some users, including Jews and non-Jews, have intentionally placed their own names within triple parentheses as a sign of solidarity.^[4]

After I reached out to Andrew, I started to see more people doing it. I did a bit more digging and realized that people were doing with the triple parentheses what many did using the rainbow overlay on their facebook and Twitter icon/images, in solidarity with the LGBTQ community.

As a Jewish Journalist, I've been victim to vicious anti-semitic attacks by leaders of the White Supremacy movement, including Edgar Steele, so I can absolutely relate to recent victims who have been attacked by Trump supporters for their coverage of Trump. Ironically, as a supporter for just treatment for Gazan and Palestinian civilians, and as a critic of extreme right wing Israelis like Israel's version of Dick Cheney, Benjamin Netanyahu, I've also been accused of being an anti-semite, often the same that I've been accused, by anti-semites of being a Zionist.

That's the story.