“Post-left Anarchists” Built A Honeypot After Playing Victim

In 2017, VICE News published the ad-copy for Raddle.me’s debut, “Radical Leftists Built Their Own Reddit After It Banned Them.” After Reddit removed r/LeftWithSharpEdge, one of its admins, ziq, told Vice they wanted a site “where socialists and anarchists wouldn’t get punished for talking out against fascism.” It promised “no ads, no tracking, no user profiling.” A frequent poster called Tequila_Wolf told Vice: “I’m always very uneasy about the lack of concern for privacy online.”

Nine years later ziq still runs the site. During that time ziq admitted running alts to stir division, and surveillance companies advertised the site to police and intel agencies. In May 2024, according to ziq, police asked the site for user data. Two days later a new account was registered. By late June it carried the administrator name Tequila_Wolf had made familiar.

In March 2017 ziq pitched the site to Reddit’s anarchists as a project of “10 anarchists” making decisions by “consensus,” with a server “out of reach of the US/UK govs.” It said: “No data is collected.”

New software (Postmill) written by the developer emma went live on 10 May 2017. Of the twenty posts on the front page that day, sixteen came from ziq or accounts ziq later admitted to running.

In April 2018 ziq posted “I’m stepping down as admin because of some shit I did” and named eleven accounts as their own. One had served as “a strawman.” Two had been used to create “divisions between raddle’s userbase.” Ten months later ziq was back on the admin list. Meanwhile one admitted account kept moderating, and in January 2019 it banned a user with a single word: “cop.”

Raddle’s founding pitch was for “socialists and anarchists.” That did not last. Ziq’s politics are firmly in the post-left, which rejects mass movements, and formal organizations, and the site reflects it. “Eradicate Left Unity,” ziq’s 2021 essay, warned that whoever rises to the top of an online left space will “cement their power with a quick purge of anyone who objects to the new management.” The North American post-left’s publishing circle, including the press Little Black Cart, took ziq in, and Raddle’s anarchism forum sends readers to the chat server of Anarchy Planet, the network behind Anarchist News.

That matters for three reasons. First, accountability; ziq says “there is no raddle collective,” and holds the domain, the server, the money and the key that signs the warrant canary. Nothing exists to check that. Second, division; splitting radicals apart is a stated aim of every counterintelligence programme ever, and ziq admitted using hidden accounts to divide users. The effect matches, whether intentional or not. Third, risk; in November 2025 the State Department designated the Informal Anarchist Federation, an insurrectionary network, a Foreign Terrorist Organization providing a vast justification for FISA use. 

Raddle’s software records the IP address behind every post, vote, private message and sign-up, and keeps it until an operator deletes it. An admin who opens the ban form sees every address a user has ever used. Admins’ own activity stores no address, and the same exemption covers users the admins mark as “trusted.”

For domestic intelligence or law enforcement, it’s a potential gold mine: a complete record of who said what, from where, among people the state now watches for terrorism, with the person in the seat leaving no trace.

The welcome page still promises “Zero tracking or analytics.” Yet all traffic has passed through Cloudflare, a US company, since about 2022, and in October 2026 the pledge to delete the site rather than obey a court order was removed.

Archived pages and the site’s moderation records show that five different accounts have held the name Tequila_Wolf in turn, each renamed when the next took over. Users saw one administrator over seven years. There were five accounts.

On the morning of 4 May 2024, ziq posted: “Transparency: Received a legal request from the police a few days ago.” Ziq wrote that it had been declined. That evening ziq rewrote the terms, which since 2018 had said the admins “will not cooperate with any court, government or law enforcement agency.” Now they promised only that data would not be handed over “without a court-ordered warrant that is jurisdictionally valid.” The same day the changelog recorded: “u/Tequila_Wolf left the list of admins.”

On 6 May a new account was registered. By 26 June it carried the name Tequila_Wolf. Two days later the page naming Raddle’s administrators was replaced with one listing no names. By 17 July the new account had administrator rights.

Police have done this before. In 2016 Australian police ran the CSAM site Childs Play as its arrested administrator; in 2017 Dutch police ran the drug market Hansa under its arrested admins’ names. Raddle’s May 2024 event sequence a similar pattern.

Ziq, emma, the surveillance company Flashpoint and the collective that runs Anarchist News did not respond to requests for comment. A day after those requests went out, ziq added a section to the terms telling users: “Do not treat alternate accounts as inherently suspicious.” The changelog dates it to 10 October. A copy of the terms saved on 19 October has no such section.

While the site was dysfunctional from the inside, it was sold from outside. In June 2019 the monitoring company Echosec announced: “Echosec has a new data provider: Raddle.me.” Flashpoint bought Echosec in 2022 and advertised that customers could monitor “Reddit, Gab, MeWe, Raddle, 4chan etc.”

Police in Ogden, Utah, put out a tender that listed Raddle among its sources, then paid Echosec $22,800 over two years. ICE has bought from Flashpoint since 2014, and its current order runs to $3.2 million.

A licence buys public posts and “access”. The administrators see everything: addresses, private messages and the links between accounts.

From 2006 to 2008 an FBI agent ran the carding forum DarkMarket as a trusted administrator. A British undercover officer held an activist campaign’s bank account and email. Hal Turner ran a far-right platform while an FBI informant. GCHQ has used false identities online to divide activists.

On Raddle, one person holds every key, and the administrator name changes hands silently. In 2024 ziq twice deleted a post asking about “serious allegations” against ziq and Tequila_Wolf as “spreading smears posted by a literal cop.”

If Raddle is a formal intelligence asset, an agency in the administrator seat would hold the addresses and private messages of anarchists globally just as the US began treating the milieu legally and openly as terrorists. That agency would decide who is trusted and who is called a cop. The pattern can also fit another story; that of a narcissist who uses hidden accounts to manipulate users and whose site is sold from the outside by surveillance companies that need nothing from them. Both stories can be true at the same time, while for the user any difference wouldn’t really matter. 

“When you have friends on government lists who get harassed at every border …” Tequila_Wolf told Vice in 2017, “… you know you don’t want to get on that list.”