\u201cIt was hard for me to book a ticket and I paid a huge fare for the panic travel,\u201d says software engineer
\n WASHINGTON
\nVacationing in India, engineer Amrutha Tamanam rushed to return to the United States after Donald Trump abruptly announced a $100,000 fee for the visa she holds.
\nAs she scrambled to get back to the country she\u2019s called home for a decade, racially motivated far-right trolls launched coordinated efforts to disrupt flight bookings from India, calling their campaign \u201cclog the toilet.\u201d
\nThe White House would later clarify that the new H-1B fee was a one-time payment not applicable to current holders. But leading US companies had already advised their employees abroad to swiftly return to avoid the fee or risk being stranded overseas.
\nTamanam, an Austin-based software engineer, began searching for a flight from the city of Vijayawada, as users on the far-right message board 4chan moved to overwhelm reservation systems, in a bid to block Indian visa holders from booking tickets.
\nOne 4chan thread encouraged users to find India-US flights, \u201cinitiate the checkout process\u201d, but \u201cdon\u2019t check out,\u201d thereby clogging the system and preventing the visa holders from reaching the United States before the announcement took effect.
\nThe campaign may have had a direct impact on Tamanam, who encountered repeated crashes on airline websites. The checkout page, which typically allows users a window of a few minutes, timed out much faster.
\nAfter multiple attempts, she eventually managed to rebook a one-way ticket to Dallas on Qatar Airways, spending around $2,000 \u2014 more than double the cost of her original round-trip fare.
\n\u201cIt was hard for me to book a ticket, and I paid a huge fare for the panic travel,\u201d Tamanam told AFP.
\n\u2018Keep them in India\u2019
\nThe 4chan thread \u2014 which also circulated among far-right Trump supporters on Telegram and other fringe forums \u2014 read: \u201cIndians are just waking up after the H1B news. Want to keep them in India? Clog the flight reservation system!\u201d
\nResponding posts, many riddled with racist slurs, advised users to hold seats for popular India-US routes on airline websites and booking platforms \u2014 without completing the purchase.
\nThe stated goal was to block availability on high-demand flights, making it harder to find available seats and inflating prices.
\nIllustrating the scale of the operation, one 4chan user posted a screenshot of their browser and claimed: \u201cI got 100 seats locked.\u201d
\n\u201cCurrently clogging the last available seat on this Delhi to Newark flight,\u201d another wrote.
\nSeveral 4chan users also posted about holding up seats on Air India and slowing the airline\u2019s website. However, an Air India spokesperson told AFP the site experienced no disruptions, with systems operating normally.
\n\u2018Shared antipathy\u2019
\nThough it was difficult to measure the campaign\u2019s overall effectiveness, the trolling was an attempt to \u201ccause panic among H-1B visa holders,\u201d Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told AFP.
\n\u201cThe real scary thing about 4chan is its ability to radicalise people into extremist beliefs,\u201d Beirich said, adding that several US mass shooters had published manifestos to the site.
\nH-1B visas allow companies to sponsor foreign workers with specialised skills \u2014 such as scientists and computer programmers \u2014 to work in the United States, initially for three years but extendable to six.
\nThe United States awards 85,000 H-1B visas per year on a lottery system, with India accounting for around three-quarters of the recipients.
\nIn an age of information warfare, the troll operation illustrates how bad actors can launch disruptive attacks \u201cwith the stroke of a keyboard,\u201d said Brian Levin, founder of the Centre for the Study of Hate and Extremism.
\n\u201cAs nationalistic politics takes hold across the world, an informal international association of opponents will use an array of aggressive tools, including the internet,\u201d Levin told AFP.
\n\u201cWhat I think is so relevant is how rapidly it spread, how diverse the nations represented were, and how shared antipathy across international borders can be mobilised online.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cIt was hard for me to book a ticket and I paid a huge fare for the panic travel,\u201d says software engineer WASHINGTON Vacationing in India, engineer Amrutha Tamanam rushed to return to the United States after Donald Trump abruptly announced a $100,000 fee for the visa she holds. As she scrambled to get back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505605,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-505574","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n