As the 2020 election campaigning heats up, so has fake news and fake social media accounts targeting Black voters. It had already been proven that in the last election Russian Internet trolls targeted Black voters with fake news and even fake social media accounts that impersonated Black social media users.

Now pro-Trump trolls are already at it again. And there is some proof. They are using stock photos of Black people to set up social media accounts and post pro-Trump items.

Recently there was a tweet that had more than a thousand shares in the hours after President Donald Trump’s latest State of the Union address.  The tweet said: “I am a Black trans woman and after this amazing speech tonight I proudly say I support Donald Trump my President. We need to get behind this man.” It was posted by “BlackTransQween” and there was a profile picture of a Black transgender woman.

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But it was all fake. The Twitter account was suspended for breaking Twitter’s rules against impersonation. This came after writer Gabe Gonzalez proved the account was using a picture of Charlene Arcila-Ecks, a transgender health advocate who died in 2015.

“It’s a concerted effort to put on basically a digital blackface,” Shireen Mitchell, founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women told The Daily Beast.

And it’s been happening since the last election. According to Mitchell, trolls created a campaign called “Stop Black Girls” to counteract an event called “Black Girls Rock.” These trolls, said Mitchell, used stock images or social media photos to pose as Black women and post inflammatory comments.

“There was this ongoing campaign of pretending to be Black women and make everybody angry because we were ‘angry Black women.’ That’s the norm, the stereotype. No one would stop and say ‘that looks wrong’ because the assumption and the stereotype,” she said. “You use the stereotype to project that all Black women are angry, so that anything we say or do becomes part of a disinformation and dismissal campaign.”

This is a very disturbing and sick problem. These fake accounts that are impersonating black people often go after me, two of them did today! But I will not be intimidated! “Digital Blackface’: Pro-Trump Trolls Are Impersonating Black People on Twitter” https://t.co/6aEwXQxUJm

— Mr. Reynolds (@melreynoldsU) February 8, 2019