How an internet mob falsely painted a Chipotle employee as racist

Dominique Moran knew something was wrong as soon as she awakened that Friday morning. She turned on her smartphone and saw the first of what would become a barrage of texts and voicemails.

“Are you okay?”

Only the night before, Moran was an unknown 23-year-old student in St. Paul, Minnesota. She had moved there from Southern California to attend college on a softball scholarship. Living alone in a new city, she worked at a Chipotle to make ends meet and attended a Lutheran church.

That morning, though, she discovered she had become someone else. Strangers were calling her nasty names on social media. Her photo was plastered across internet news sites. A video was circulating online, and she was its villain. In it, she could be seen refusing to serve a group of black men at the restaurant the previous evening.

[None of it was true, but she lost her job anyway!]

Just about every week we see the same story. Someone takes a jittery smartphone video of a white person caught in the act of doing something that’s labeled racist. An army of online commentators mobilizes. The video goes viral. And the person in the video is publicly shamed, often losing a job or being ostracized by the community. His or her name becomes a hashtag for hate.

The circulation of these racist outrage videos is so common that they’ve become the online version of background noise. The social scientist Eugenia Siapera says they often trigger “ambient digital racism” — racially toxic online posts from ordinary people that are so commonplace they no longer shock.

Yet there is another part of this story that is rarely told because it is not as common. What happens when you are falsely accused of being a racist in a video?

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