Blood, Betrayal, and Gigabyte Genocide: The Digital Social Media War on the Urban Indian “We have no Friends”

For over five centuries, the American Indian has faced one unbroken truth: we have no real allies. Since the first ships landed, we have been rewritten, renamed, and reclassified out of existence. In today’s world, the erasure continues not by sword or musket, but by hashtags, algorithms, and racial labels that serve the same colonial purpose: to bury the Indigenous identity of those who do not fit the image mainstream America wants to see.

Social Media has Taught the Urban Indians we have no Friends or Allies just Zombies and Opps

The Modern War of Misclassification

Urban Indians, the descendants of those who survived removal, enslavement, and forced migration are still at war, but now it’s digital. Social media has become the new frontier of colonization, where identity is policed by both white and Black voices demanding that we submit to being labeled “African” or “Black.”

The irony is painful: our ancestors gave shelter to escaped Africans, intermarried, and offered them land, food, and freedom only to be erased from history and replaced with the narrative of the “Black slave owner” or “Pretendian.” The descendants of those who once found refuge among us now echo the colonizer’s language, mocking the Indigenous identity of those misclassified by law and blood quantum.

Weapons of Erasure: Blood Quantum and the BIA

The U.S. government perfected the art of Indigenous erasure through bureaucratic racism. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) used policies like blood quantum to fractionize identity and control who could legally “exist” as Indian. The Freedmen policies supposedly designed to protect instead divided families and forced American Indians with darker skin to be recorded as “Black,” “Negro,” or “Colored.”

Those same systems continue today. They determine funding, recognition, and access to healthcare, land, and culture. Every denial of recognition is another chapter in the ongoing genocide a paper genocide that reclassified entire Nations into extinction.

Digital Lynching and Social Media Violence

Social media has become a battlefield. Every time an Urban Indian speaks the truth about their lineage or history, an online mob is waiting  calling us “frauds,” “Pretendians,” or worse. These attacks aren’t just digital insults; they’re modern-day lynchings. They strip dignity, isolate community, and erase heritage.

Platforms that claim to celebrate “diversity” allow the mass suppression of Indigenous voices that don’t fit neat categories. Algorithms amplify mockery while silencing truth. The Urban Indian ,the original American, has become invisible in the land of their own ancestors.

The Forgotten Fact: We Were the First to Welcome, the Last to Be Remembered

When the first Africans escaped bondage, it was the American Indian who opened the door. When the first colonizers landed, it was the American Indian who offered them food, land, and survival. And when the U.S. government sought to erase us, it was the American Indian who fought and still fights to preserve what little remains.

But history has no mercy for those who are dark and Indigenous. We were lynched, displaced, enslaved, and renamed and today, we are shadow-banned, mislabeled, and mocked for daring to exist outside the colonizer’s classification system.

A New Identity War and the Need for Solidarity

Urban Indians stand at a crossroads. We are reclaiming who we are, demanding to be seen as the original people of this land, not as political categories or colonial creations. But we do so with few allies.

To the world, we say this: We are not an extinct people. We are not “Black with Indian in us.” We are American Indians, the descendants of Nations erased by ink and policy, not blood.

We have been the only ones standing for ourselves for 500 years. Yet, even in this age of digital activism, our story remains untold.

The Urban Indian’s struggle is not just about reclaiming names or bloodlines, it's about survival. Every mislabeled census entry, every social media insult, every denial of recognition is a continuation of the same theft that began centuries ago.

We are not your myth, your hashtag, or your cultural costume.

 We are the people who never stopped being Indigenous, even when the world stopped calling us that.

Key Citations & Source Ideas

1. Racial Misclassification / Misidentification of AI/AN Populations

• Blood Politics, Ethnic Identity, and Racial Misclassification among American Indians and Alaska Natives Emily Haozous et al. documents how misclassification in medical, mortality, and public health records consistently undercounts or mislabels Indigenous people, attributing deaths or illnesses to “other” racial categories. PMC

• Racial Misclassification of American Indians and Alaska Natives on Death Certificates in the United States Belgarde & Martin explores how death records frequently misrecord Native identity, contributing to erasure in mortality statistics. UND Scholarly Commons

• Misracialization of Indigenous people in population health and epidemiology  shows how Indigenous identity is wrongly assigned or merged with other categories, leading to underestimation of Indigenous-specific health metrics. OUP Academic

• Challenges with misclassification of American Indian/Alaska Native discusses complexities in death records where AI/AN identities are misassigned (especially in states) and how that impacts public health understanding. PMC

From the Urban Indian Health Institute: 55% of AI/AN people with HIV in California in 2007 were misidentified racially in HIV/AIDS reporting systems. uihi.org

2. Blood Quantum, BIA, and Governmental Tools of Erasure

• A Legal History of Blood Quantum in Federal Indian Law to 1935  traces how blood quantum concepts were introduced in U.S. federal policy and how they evolved as tools to control who “counts” as Indian. NNI Database

• Blood Quantum and Sovereignty: A Guide explains how the Bureau of Indian Affairs used Census rolls beginning in 1884 to record fractional “Indian blood” designations, often incorrectly, and how Certificates of Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB) are still used. Native Governance Center

• Blood Quantum and the White Gatekeeping of Native American Identity an article in the California Law Review arguing that blood quantum has been used as a gatekeeping device by white institutions to exclude those of mixed descent and effectively shrink native populations. California Law Review

Exploring the Historical Complexities of Native Identity Formation, Blood Quantum and Modern Tribal Enrollment Criteria a recent academic article tracing how colonial and governmental systems imposed racial categories on Indigenous identity. journalofglobalindigeneity.com

3. Pretendians, Identity Fraud, and Academic / Social Media Tensions

• Pretendians and Publications: The Problem and Solutions to Redface Research (Yellowhead Institute)  concerns about people fraudulently claiming Indigenous identity, misappropriating resources, and harming Indigenous scholarship. Yellowhead Institute

• The Pretendian Problem  examines how identity fraud (in academia and public life) distorts Indigenous studies and challenges authenticity. Cambridge University Press & Assessment

• Indigenous Identity Fraud (Teillet Report, University of Saskatchewan) provides definitions, history, red flags, and institutional policy recommendations around identity fraud in Indigenous contexts. indigenous

Pretendians and the Indian Act (ICT, Inc.)  discusses how “pretendians” or identity fraudsters have become part of the conversation about Indigenous identity, and how institutions respond. Indigenous Corporate Training

4. Microaggressions, Cultural Misrepresentation, Identity Stress

• Experiences of Microaggressions Among American Indians / Alaska Natives documents how Indigenous students endure constant questioning, cultural stereotypes, identity policing, and that these microaggressions harm mental health and academic performance. Colorado School of Public Health

• Racialization as a Barrier to Achieving Health Equity for Native Americans  discusses how racialization (the process of viewing people through racial categories) influences clinicians’ assumptions about Indigenous patients, which is another layer of identity erasure. Journal of Ethics

Ending the Erasure of American Indian and Alaska Native Adolescents and Young Adults in Research — highlights how AI/AN youth are too often grouped as “other” or excluded from data sets entirely, intensifying invisibility. jahonline.org

🔥 “Digital Colonization: How Foreign and State Psyops Exploit Black and Indigenous Communities Online”

In the 21st century, conquest no longer requires armies marching on stolen land. Today, it can happen in the comment sections, hashtags, and “community pages” of social media. Black and Indigenous communities already carrying centuries of disenfranchisement, erasure, and exploitation—have become prime targets for coordinated psychological operations (psyops) designed to manipulate narratives, suppress political power, and fracture solidarity.

This isn’t conspiracy theory. It’s documented fact. Multiple government reports, independent investigations, and platform disclosures prove that foreign state actors and government-funded networks have run race-targeted disinformation campaigns against these communities.

1. Russia’s Troll Factories and the Targeting of Black Americans

The clearest case comes from the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Kremlin-linked troll farm exposed during the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

• The IRA created Facebook and Instagram pages like Blacktivist and BlackMattersUS, which gained hundreds of thousands of followers by pretending to be genuine Black activist groups.

• According to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report (Senate Report, Vol. 2), these fake accounts spread memes, promoted street protests, and pushed voter-suppression messages like “boycott the election” or “both parties are the same.”

• A Mueller indictment (DOJ indictment PDF) details how the IRA budgeted millions of dollars to reach targeted racial demographics in the U.S.

This was not random trolling it was systematic exploitation of Black struggle, weaponizing centuries of injustice into digital tools for destabilization.

2. Posing as Native Voices: Standing Rock and the Pipeline Protests

Indigenous struggles have also been directly targeted. During the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protests at Standing Rock, foreign accounts posing as Native activists flooded social media.

• Investigations by The Washington Post (WaPo coverage) and MPR News revealed that IRA-run accounts shared protest photos and memes, amplifying both pro- and anti-pipeline content.

• The goal was not solidarity it was chaos. By pretending to be Indigenous voices, Russian operatives could deepen mistrust between Native activists, environmentalists, oil workers, and the state.

• This was digital infiltration of Indigenous sovereignty movements, echoing centuries of surveillance and disruption of Native resistance.

3. China, Iran, and the New Frontier of Racialized Influence

Russia is not alone. Other governments have adopted similar strategies:

• China’s “50 Cent Army” and state-linked disinformation networks have run covert influence campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, according to Meta’s Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior report. While their primary focus is geopolitical, they frequently insert themselves into U.S. racial debates, amplifying posts on police violence and protests.

• Iranian networks have likewise pushed divisive racial narratives, sometimes mimicking both left-wing and right-wing accounts to maximize discord (Meta Transparency Report).

These campaigns prove that racial fractures are viewed as strategic weak points—ripe for exploitation by governments seeking to weaken U.S. democracy.

4. Psyops Playbook: Divide, Distract, Demobilize

What makes these operations effective? They follow a consistent playbook:

• Divide: Frame Black and Indigenous struggles as being in opposition, erasing histories of shared oppression and solidarity. Example: memes claiming “Indigenous people enslaved Africans too” without context or citation.

• Distract: Flood timelines with rage-bait content that shifts attention from concrete political organizing to endless arguments.

• Demobilize: Spread narratives of hopelessness “voting doesn’t matter,” “the system will never change” that encourage withdrawal instead of action.

As the RAND Corporation notes in its study of online influence campaigns, these tactics aim less at persuasion and more at eroding trust, cohesion, and civic participation (RAND report).

5. Why Black and Indigenous Communities?

Disinformation targets everyone, but why are Black and Indigenous communities consistently singled out?

• Historical vulnerability: Centuries of colonial erasure, forced assimilation, and racial violence mean these communities already face mistrust in mainstream institutions.

• Political power: Black voters have been called the “backbone” of U.S. democracy, and Indigenous resistance movements pose real threats to extractive industries. Suppressing or fracturing these voices benefits both foreign and domestic power structures.

Cultural resonance: Racial injustice is not only a U.S. issue; it resonates globally. By amplifying it in manipulative ways, foreign actors make their campaigns more viral.

6. Digital Colonization and the New Frontline

What we are witnessing is a form of digital colonization. Just as colonial powers once manipulated divisions among Indigenous nations or between free and enslaved Africans, modern state actors use algorithms, memes, and fake accounts to achieve the same ends.

The battlefield is no longer the plantation or the reservation it’s the newsfeed.

7. How Communities Can Fight Back

• Verify the source: If a post inflames anger but offers no verifiable source, treat it with caution.

• Cross-check with trusted organizations: Black-led and Indigenous-led media outlets, scholars, and grassroots orgs are less likely to push psyops narratives.

• Track hashtags: If a hashtag appears out of nowhere and trends overnight, check who started it was it real activists, or a troll farm?

Educate others: Share resources like Freedom House’s “Freedom on the Net” that document disinformation tactics.

Sources:

• U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Russian Interference, Vol. 2

• DOJ Indictment of Internet Research Agency

• Washington Post – Russian Facebook Ads

• Meta Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Reports

• RAND Report on Foreign Interference

• Freedom House – Manipulating Social Media to Undermine Democracy

FIRST TRIBE