“MAGA Drag” refers to a public demonstration modality not invented by Trump adherents but often engaged in by his followers. One may notice that these three online networks all share one thing in common: they’re all MAGA Drag channels, something Zello didn’t deem particularly threatening (or otherwise just not fitting underneath their bannable designation of “militia”). Those channels with ownership overlap are labeled in the next visualization: visualization generated in Kumu Just looking at the “Owner” of the channels results in the following visualization, another way to show the grey squares “top owners” visualization: visualization generated in Kumuįinally, another focus here is those channels that have remained online. One of the things that is an easy indication of tighter networks or more group overlap is if the channels share executive teams. It’s an admittedly fairly unwieldy visualization, which begs for more specificity.
#ZELLO CHANNELS 2021 FULL#
Here’s a visualization of the full map of far-right actors sent to Zello: visualization generated in Kumu We have probable cause, acts of treason, election fraud.” in tape published in an On the Media podcast accompanying some of the work you’re reading here. 1%Watchdog was also the voice heard egging on the Oath Keepers now facing conspiracy charges in J6, telling Jess Watkins and others involved in the storming that “You are executing citizen’s arrest. It’s hard to verify if all of these accounts are still active and it doesn’t appear that Zello is pursuing major account or device bans beyond a few recorded instances (notably the leader of the III% Security Force and the admin of the MyMilitia forum seemingly lost their accounts), but 1%Watchdog is still highly active and creating new channels each week.
![zello channels 2021 zello channels 2021](https://149514549.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Zello.jpg)
The 1%Watchdog network, as one may recall, was also connected to some troubling content and is actually one of the channels that Ohio Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins was participating on during the US Capitol Building storming. “steele001” and “1%Watchdog” were both directly referenced in the earlier MW piece on Zello, the former for their centrality within the III% Defense Militia environment and the latter for the USCF network. The above is likely a bit overwhelming, especially given that the text hardly fits in most of the squares, so it’s good to focus on the higher end of the visualization, these top 12 channel owners: Full chart, weighted by the number of channels owned here: visualization generated in Google Data Studio Even just exploring the owners of the channels sent to Zello, there’s some obvious coalescence around several influential Zello users. Zello provides highly networked voice communication, even if the app claimed not to be social media previously. Yet 6.4% of the overall channels remain online. Some groups rushed to delete their channels when news of militia involvement in the 6 January storming started to reach a fever pitch. 10% of the channels also returned a ‘404’ error, which is usually indicative that the channel has been deleted by its owner. However, of the channels sent to them, the status is detailed below:Ĩ3.6% of these channels now return a ‘410’ error, which appears to be a Zello-induced ban of the channel. Firstly, this indicates that they were likely already gathering channel affiliation with the potential plan of monitoring or banning these channels. Zello claims to have banned 2000 militia channels, which is over double the amount of channels sent to them as part of this investigation.
![zello channels 2021 zello channels 2021](https://ve3wzw.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/And-zello-e1619530029995.jpg)
The “Militia” item in the legend is just a stand-in for unaffiliated militia groups, including both non-descript “patriot” militia groups and local groups not describing themselves as Oath Keepers or III% or otherwise. It’s a brand of militia that has multiple competing splinters and most of those splinters started on Zello years ago. Despite their high numbers in this network, it is unsurprising just how represented the III% groups are within this network. The overall percentage of groups that claimed III% character is also slightly larger, as some “Patriot Emergency Response” channels and even some Oath Keepers channels claimed a dual status as both III% and some other character. Over 50% of all channels in the list were explicitly III% groups. Visualization generated in Google Data Studio