Engineer Amrutha Tamanam, who was vacationing in India, suddenly found herself in a frantic race against time. The reason? A shocking announcement by Donald Trump: a hefty $100,000 fee for the very visa she held, prompting her to rush back to the United States.
While Amrutha desperately tried to secure her return to the U.S., a disturbing online phenomenon emerged. Racially motivated far-right trolls launched a coordinated campaign, chillingly dubbed ‘clog the toilet,’ aimed at sabotaging flight bookings from India.
Although the White House later clarified that the new H-1B visa fee was a one-time charge not applicable to existing visa holders, the initial announcement created widespread panic. Major U.S. companies had already urged their overseas employees to return immediately to avoid the fee, or face the prospect of being stuck abroad indefinitely.
Amidst this chaos, Amrutha, a software engineer based in Austin, began her search for a flight from Vijayawada. Unbeknownst to many, users on the far-right message board 4chan were actively conspiring to overwhelm airline reservation systems, with the sinister goal of preventing Indian visa holders from securing their tickets.
Deliberately Disrupting Travel Plans
A specific 4chan thread instructed users to search for India-U.S. flights, proceed to the checkout page, but *not* complete the purchase. The objective was to overload the booking systems, effectively stopping visa holders from returning to the U.S. before the new policy could potentially impact them.
Amrutha experienced these disruptions firsthand. Airline websites repeatedly crashed, and checkout pages, which normally offer a few minutes to complete a transaction, timed out almost instantly.
After numerous frustrating attempts, she finally managed to secure a one-way ticket to Dallas on Qatar Airways. The cost? A staggering $2,000 – more than double what she had paid for her initial round-trip flight.
The Racist Call: ‘Keep Them in India’
This malicious 4chan thread, which quickly spread across Telegram and other fringe platforms favored by far-right Trump supporters, explicitly stated: “Indians are just waking up after the H1B news. Want to keep them in India? Clog the flight reservation system!”
The replies were filled with hateful, racist slurs, urging users to reserve seats on high-demand India-U.S. flights across various airline and booking platforms, but deliberately abandon the purchase process.
Their explicit goal was to block seat availability on these popular routes, thereby creating artificial scarcity and driving up ticket prices for those desperately trying to travel.
To highlight the sheer scale of this coordinated attack, one 4chan user even shared a screenshot, boasting: “I got 100 seats locked.”
Another chilling post read: “Currently clogging the last available seat on this Delhi to Newark flight.”
While many 4chan users claimed to be targeting Air India’s website and slowing its operations, a spokesperson for the airline later confirmed to AFP that their systems remained unaffected and operated normally.
The Power of Shared Antipathy Online
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, remarked to AFP that while the campaign’s full impact is hard to gauge, its clear intention was to “cause panic among H-1B visa holders.”
Beirich emphasized the alarming potential of platforms like 4chan: “The real scary thing about 4chan is its ability to radicalize people into extremist beliefs.” She further noted that several U.S. mass shooters have previously published their manifestos on the site.
H-1B visas are designed for companies to sponsor foreign professionals with specialized skills, like scientists and computer programmers, to work in the United States for an initial period of three years, extendable up to six.
Each year, the United States allocates 85,000 H-1B visas through a lottery system, with approximately three-quarters of these highly sought-after visas going to individuals from India.
Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, highlighted how this troll operation underscores the reality of information warfare: bad actors can now orchestrate significant disruptions “with the stroke of a keyboard.”
Mr. Levin cautioned AFP that “As nationalistic politics takes hold across the world, an informal international association of opponents will use an array of aggressive tools, including the internet.”
He concluded by stressing the critical observation: “What 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 mobilized online.”