When Internet troll Chuck Johnson announced the launch of WeSearchr last year, it created some shock waves in the political world. The idea of an alt right-oriented crowdfunding site that would pay for investigations that would embarrass prominent Democrats was unnerving to the left.
WeSearchr works by coming up with assignments aimed at yielding juicy and compromising details about a person or group, and offering “bounties” to anyone able to dig up those pieces of information. In the six months that it’s been in operation, the site has dangled plenty of eye-catching bounties in front of readers—like asking for Hillary Clinton’s real health records, which would presumably show her in ailing health, or trying to find the man who punched white nationalist leader Richard Spencer in the face during President Trump’s inauguration.
But so far, WeSearchr hasn’t turned out to be the killer cocktail of James O’Keefe and Kickstarter that some people on the left feared.
It’s had no trouble raising money to fund its investigations, with several dozen donors ponying up a total of about $300,000. But most of its challenges have gone unsolved and its bounties unrealized. If part of the site’s purpose is to galvanize amateur sleuths around the country to make Democrats and liberals squirm—it doesn’t seem to be fulfilling the mission.
Of the over 70 bounties listed on the site thus far, only five have been paid out—for a total of $38,000—and two of them went directly to Johnson himself for information he already had. The “scoops” that enabled Johnson to claim those two bounties could be summed up as “stuff gathering dust in Malik Obama’s basement.” In those cases, Johnson acquired the items from Malik (a close friend of Johnson and Barack Obama’s half brother) and asked WeSearchr to pay him more than $10,000 and more than $7,500, respectively, to disseminate them.
Johnson said he did not remember how much he paid Malik for the two pieces of information: a video of Barack and Michelle’s trip to Kenya in 1990, and an early draft of Barack’s memoir, Dreams From My Father. Johnson alleged both contained compromising information about Obama.
When we asked Johnson if he set up WeSearchr primarily to make money off information he had already had in his possession, he said “pretty much.”
“To a certain extent I built it for myself, but I put it up there for the next generation like me,” said Johnson, 28.
Malik and Johnson became friends during the recent presidential election after Malik came out as a Trump supporter. Johnson has interviewed Malik on occasion, and many assume Johnson operates Malik’s hugely popular and meme-savvy Twitter account.
Johnson promised users of WeSearchr that the video showed Barack Obama’s true feelings about white people. The video was a short documentary made by Obama’s sister Auma chronicling the former president’s first trip to Kenya with his then-fiancee, Michelle. WeSearchr users donated $10,113 to get him to release it.
So what was the “damning” proof of Obama’s distaste towards white people worthy of such a large reward? Well, watch for yourself, as it was published on InfoWars, but here’s a sample.
“I’m deeply saddened by a sense that whites are still superior in this country, in some sense if you sit at a restaurant, they’re served before a Kenyan was served,” Obama said in the documentary. “If you go through customs, a white person’s gonna have an easier time going through customs… You know if you look around Kenya right now, you get a sense, although on the surface things are relatively tranquil, right beneath the surface, things could explode at any point.”
To me, it seems like pretty standard observations about race relations in Kenya, and the rest of the documentary is probably more of interest to Obama lovers than the right-wingers at WeSearchr.
Johnson told us that the video is useful to people on the right who are following Obama’s life closely, and added that none of site’s 52 donors had requested a refund.
Crowdsourcing has led to some major revelations online. When hundreds of bored young people on Reddit and 4chan get their minds together, they can do incredible works of investigative journalism, like combing through thousands of leaked emails during the election. But WeSearchr doesn’t seem to have lit a fire under would-be Internet gumshoes. That may be because many of the bounties are either largely impossible to win (e.g. one asked them to solve Seth Rich’s murder) or boring and too easily attainable, like fetching divorce records.
Also, while traditional crowdsourcing is free and collaborative, with lots of people bouncing ideas off each other, crowdfunded bounties incentivize researchers to work alone and secretly to secure the full payout for themselves. That may inherently reduce the potential pool of people who want to take on these information hunts.
In addition to the Kenya video, Johnson also obtained from Malik’s storage a draft of Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father, with editor’s notes. The site raised $7,835 to release the original manuscript, which, Johnson says, “proves” Obama did not actually write the book. (Some conspiracy theorists have claimed Bill Ayers, founder of the ’60s violent radical group Weathermen—and who crossed paths with Obama in Chicago in the mid-1990s—was the actual author.)
The “proof” that parts of the manuscript were not written by Obama consists of a few sticky notes that say “Not O” on the pages. It also has a part where Obama crossed out a line that said his grandfather was a Muslim.
The information did not make much of a splash outside GotNews.com, another site founded by Johnson that publishes everything from scoops to alt right relationship advice. Not even Breitbart, ground zero for many of the media’s most strident attacks on the former president, covered the “revelations.”
Johnson says that despite the fact that most of WeSearchr’s challenges remain unsolved, he still believes the information it’s uncovering is valuable. Right now, he says, the site is in a trial phase, and eventually he hopes to branch out into other areas, including hunting down information for law enforcement and perhaps dredging up scandalous items on celebrities. Speaking metaphorically, Johnson told us, “I own a minor league team right now, but I want to own the whole NBA.”
Johnson, who founded WeSearchr along with Pax Dickinson, the former CTO of Business Insider, has been described in numerous headlines as the biggest troll on the Internet. He was one of the first people to be permanently banned from Twitter, and gained his notoriety as a journalist by posting personal information about New York Times reporters and revealing the identity of the University of Virginia rape hoaxer. Although he started at mainstream publications like The Wall Street Journal, Johnson has been pushed to the fringes, with his own site Got News.
WeSearchr, his latest venture, has already drawn the ire of major tech companies. Reddit does not allow users to link to the site, as they claim it promotes doxxing, or the malicious online posting of people’s personal information, and even banned the alt right subreddit for posting WeSearchr links. After WeSearchr put out a bounty for the man who punched Richard Spencer, Twitter banned their account.
“I like how naughty it is flouting journalistic conventions like paying for information,” Johnson told us about WeSearchr.
WeSearchr did uncover a tape of Sen. John McCain broadcasting North Vietnamese propaganda after he had been captured during the Vietnam War. Once the bounty (for $10k) started getting steam, Johnson said a researcher at the Library of Congress found the tape and submitted it to the site. But it certainly hasn’t made a dent in McCain’s standing, and many found it understandable that the Arizona senator would agree to broadcast propaganda after the prolonged physical torture he endured. (UPDATE: A source told Heat Street that Johnson had been shopping the McCain tape around before putting the bounty up on WeSearchr).
One of the other “solved bounties” was $10,000 to pay Kathy Shelton’s travel expenses to attend the presidential debate as a guest of Donald Trump. Shelton was sexually assaulted as a child in Arkansas, and her rapist was represented by then-legal aid lawyer Hillary Clinton. Another bounty, for $500, was paid to attain publicly accessible divorce records for the founder of the fact-checking site Snopes.
There is also one WeSearchr bounty that has been completed but not marked solved—and the person who found the information says it’s been about three weeks and he still hasn’t gotten paid. The site offered $521 to anyone who would stand in front of Shia Labeouf’s “He Will Not Divide Us” livestream in Queens, New York, holding a sign that said “#SueTwitter” and “wesearchr.com” for 20 minutes. The task was completed—there’s even video evidence of the deed being done.
Johnson claims he has not seen the bounty request, but usually pays out within 30 days. As of publication the bounty still had not been marked solved.
Update: The bounty above has been paid out soon after the publication of this article.
Follow me on Twitter @William__Hicks
