The 'swarm': How a subset of Sanders supporters use hostile tactics to drown out critics

[Hortensis]

13. DanTex, Sanders says he lives in a different world, and

I understand that you see things very differently from me also. But my reality is that the NYT article is neither admiring nor dishonest, it's fact-based and alarming, and it reports years of behaviors that may be accelerating.

Btw, coming on the word "centrism" used in a threat by some thug described in this article caused me to remember that centrist is a term you repeatedly misuse in describing Democrats Sanders has voted with 95-99% for years and years. Could hardly forget anyone repeatedly suggesting, by the transitive property of smears, that Sanders is a centrist.

Yet as Mr. Sanders moves to position himself as a standard-bearer for a party he has criticized from the left for decades, the power of his internet army has also alarmed Democrats who are familiar with its underside, experienced in ways large and small.

Some progressive activists who declined to back Mr. Sanders have begun traveling with private security after incurring online harassment. Several well-known feminist writers said they had received death threats. A state party chairwoman changed her phone number. A Portland lawyer saw her business rating tumble on an online review site after tussling with Sanders supporters on Twitter. Other notable targets have included ... “But you have to be very cognizant when you say anything critical of Bernie online. You might have to put your phone down. There’s going to be a blowback, and it could be sexist, racist and vile.” ...

When Mr. Sanders’s supporters swarm someone online, they often find multiple access points to that person’s life, compiling what can amount to investigative dossiers. They will attack all public social media accounts, posting personal insults that might flow in by the hundreds. Some of the missives are direct threats of violence, which can be reported to Twitter or Facebook and taken down. ... For some perceived Sanders critics, there has been mail sent to home addresses — or the home addresses of relatives. The contents were unremarkable: news articles about the political perils of centrism. The message seemed clear: We know where you live. ...

But many political veterans outside the Sanders operation fault the campaign’s handling of the vitriol. Jess Morales Rocketto, a progressive strategist who worked on campaigns for Barack Obama and Mrs. Clinton, said Mr. Sanders had empowered aides and surrogates who “have a tendency to aggressively amplify things that a campaign would normally shut down amongst supporters. There are always people who say things that are problematic. It’s not that that is unique to Bernie’s campaign,” she said. “What’s unique is it is a consistent problem in the universe of Bernie Sanders.” ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/us/politics/bernie-sanders-internet-supporters-2020.html