Data leak from far-right forum Poast reveals daycare owner with Nazi avatar, college professor who’s ‘unapologetic national socialist’
Data from Poast, the far-right social media forum that was hacked earlier this year, reveals employees from big tech companies, college professors, and a woman who runs a daycare who reshared ads for Nazi-themed soap.
Similar to sites such as 4chan and the notorious Kiwi Farms, Poast, a federated social network that functions similarly to Mastodon, experienced a data breach in May that resulted in the leak of thousands of email addresses, usernames, and direct messages.
Initial analysis of the data showed widespread praise of Nazi ideology as well as frequent use of racial and homophobic slurs. As reported last month by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, 28,382 mentions of the N-word were present in the direct messages of users alone.
Now, an HTML file provided to hacker maia arson crimew from an anonymous source details more information about roughly 260 of the site's users. The source said they cross-checked the leaked email addresses against LinkedIn, thus connecting the personal information and employment history of Poast's users. Not only that, the source compiled what they believed to be each users' five most concerning posts or direct messages.
Examination of the HTML file by the Daily Dot reveals employees from leading tech giants, academia, and military. One user, who never made a post on the site, currently works at the U.S. Department of Defense, according to the LinkedIn profile associated with their email address.
Another user on Poast, who had an image of the Nazi sunwheel symbol as their profile picture, appears to work as a professor at a private Christian liberal arts school in North Carolina. They describes themselves as an "Unapologetic National Socialist" in their Poast bio.
In one direct message to another user, they praised Poast for having "normal White people" and not too "many boomer f*gs and jews to fuck shit up."
While the majority of users appear to be male, several women, including a former law enforcement officer, are present as well. One woman, who uses a Nazi "Totenkopf" skull for her profile picture, even appears to run a daycare center in Georgia. The woman frequently reposted another user named "DustyShekel" who promoted Nazi-themed "Swastika Soap" bars on a separate antisemitic website.
The woman's name matches up with a person who was recently involved in a case where she was accused of using Gab to send racist threats to an employee at her husband's work.
According to the DMs leaked to crimew, the same user appears to have also been on Gab.
Her LinkedIn lists her as owner of a home daycare, which matches the name of a daycare listed on a childcare site.
The Daily Dot reached out to the email address associated with the woman's account but did not receive a reply by press time. The professor in North Carolina also did not respond to a request for comment.
A number of LinkedIn accounts listed in the data, since it published, appear to have been deleted.
The technology sector appears to be the most common employer among the site's users. Current and former employees from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, and Yahoo are present. The majority of those users never made a post or sent a direct message and it remains unclear why they joined the site.
A user having signed up for Poast does not indicate that they necessarily agreed with the views of other users. Some accounts were even linked to journalists covering the topic of extremism, including one who reached out to a user for comment regarding an article.
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