The tweet was about a black woman who had been violently beaten and raped in an alley in Birmingham, Alabama, on July 7, 2017.
It was retweeted thousands of times, which caused the hashtag #MyFirstVote to trend.
It quickly gained traction as a political slogan and has become a meme on social media.
But not everyone saw it as a good idea.
The hashtag quickly became associated with an Alabama woman, Jessica Owens, who was beaten and killed by her estranged husband, Matthew Owens, in the early hours of the morning.
Her death is a particularly brutal example of the way in which the social justice warrior movement has hijacked the term #MyForum to create a “war on white people” narrative, a narrative that the victim and her family have accused Owens’ husband of instigating.
A few days later, in November 2017, Breitbart News published an article by a white nationalist named Stephen Bannon in which he wrote: “The election will come down to how the country will respond to the sexual assault of a young Black woman in a park in Birmingham.
There is no doubt in my mind that if a young woman in America were to be assaulted in this manner by a member of a white supremacist group, the white race would be dead.”
A couple of weeks later, on November 9, the Trump administration ordered a federal investigation into Owens’ death.
What’s the real story?
A few months later, Breitbart reported that the “Black Lives Matter” hashtag was being used as a “propaganda weapon” to help push Trump’s election.
This led to a barrage of articles from various media outlets claiming that #MyFavoriteRacism hashtag had been used by white supremacists to attack Black people.
The articles claimed that the hashtag was a weapon of hate and violence, and that the #MyFavouriteRacists movement had “taken the #myfavouriteracism movement” and “created a movement to promote racism and white supremacy in the United States.”
The stories also implied that the term “#MyFavoriteRace” was a hate symbol, and had been deployed by white nationalists.
White nationalists and Trump supporters also used the hashtag to attack Democrats and progressives, and used it to call for a nationwide rally against police brutality.
A number of prominent journalists including Matthew Boyle, the editor-in-chief of the influential conservative news site The Gateway Pundit, were caught in the crossfire.
Boyle had published a widely circulated story on November 11 about a “white nationalist” gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, which he claimed was a “White Nationalist rally” that had been scheduled for the same day that Owens’ murder.
This story was picked up by the Washington Post and The Daily Beast.
A Twitter user identified as @Ferguson_Ferguson tweeted the Breitbart News article, which was later picked up on by other media outlets.
The Gateway Pounds own article, published in November 2018, went viral.
In it, Boyle described Owens’ killing as a violent act that he described as “a hate crime,” while Breitbart News’s own editor, Joel Pollak, was caught in an attempt to defend the story and his co-author.
Boyle wrote that Owens “was brutally beaten and assaulted,” and that he and Pollak had been present “to witness the brutal attack on Ms. Owens.”
Boyle claimed that Pollak was not at the scene, and claimed that he had “no reason to doubt the truth of the story.”
Pollak wrote that the only person who could have been at the park where Owens was beaten was a white man named Michael Brown, and said that he “was there at least three times” during the attack.
Pollak said that Owens was “a black woman” who “was beaten to the point of unconsciousness.”
Boyle wrote that it was “absurd” that Pollack would defend a story that “has no basis in fact,” and accused Pollak of “linking the death of a Black woman to the Black Lives Matter movement,” adding that Pollap was a member “of the neo-Nazi alt-right.”
Pollack has not issued an apology for his tweets, and has defended them as “just the kind of words I use every day.”
“I believe that the word ‘racism’ has been misconstrued by some and misused by others, and I take responsibility for that,” Pollak wrote.
“In my own words, the word has been used to refer to groups that are anti-white, to refer, in this case, to groups of people that engage in racial and sexual violence against Black people.”
Boyle’s own article and others in the Breitbart news piece were widely criticized as racially insensitive and in violation of the First Amendment, which protects the right to free speech.
Some people were also upset that Breitbart News had chosen to promote the hashtag as a rallying cry for Trump supporters and the alt-rights movement,