‘Operation Pride Fall’ is a far-right online campaign targeting this year’s Pride.
Following the failure of their live stream on Sunday evening due to technical problems, London DJs and promotors Horse Meat Disco announced last night that they had been the target of an online hack by a far-right group.
In a statement on their Facebook page, HMD said that they were targeted by the group as soon as they went live: “Having done several dry runs with everything working perfectly well we ran into immediate difficulties when you all tuned in. The Facebook event simultaneously received high numbers of links to fake donation pages relentlessly posted by bots.” The live stream was a fundraiser for London venue The Eagle, home to Horse Meat Disco. The Eagle is currently struggling financially due to the pandemic.
Mark Oakley, owner of The Eagle told Attack “As soon as we started the live stream the system kept going down, you could hear a microphone sound through our feed, and people were being redirected to a completely bogus GoFundMe page to take their credit card details to get them to play for the live stream… We had to make a decision to pull it down immediately.”
On their Facebook page, The Eagle reprinted a warning they had received from LGBTQ police liaison officer, Lee Hawkins from the Metropolitan Police regarding “an alt-right social media hate campaign being organised on 4Chan to interrupt and shut down [Pride] events.” It went on: “A report has been received regarding a targeted online attack called ‘Operation Pride Fall’ being organised on 4Chan. They are planning to flood Twitter to send hate messages to LGBT+ people and allies on the 1st June 2020, to discourage people from supporting LGBT+ rights.”
The police advise that anyone affected by this action should “reach out to your local LGBT+ communities, partner organisations and forums, and submit reports to build an intel picture”.