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So it's no secret that I'm kind of a scrub. The song no Scrubs by TLC was written about me. I know I was like, what, 15 when that came out? But that's probably true. And lately I've been trying to be a little more intentional about the clothes I wear. Because when I'm not. I'm really just out here buying band T shirts and the same four pairs of pants and wearing them over and over again. That's why Quints has been my go to. The fabrics feel high quality, the fits are clean and everything just seems to work without needing to overthink it. Quince has all the wardrobe staples for spring. Think 100% European linen shorts and shirts from $34. Lightweight, breathable and comfortable, but still look put together and clean. 100% Pima cotton tees with a softness that has to be felt to be believed. I don't know what Pima cotton is, but I bet it's better than Puma cotton. Their pants also hit that same balance. Relaxed and comfortable, still polished enough to wear pretty much anywhere. I recently got a 100% European linen relaxed short sleeve shirt and it's great. As a person who likes to be 100% relaxed, what could be better than that? Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to Quince.com hyperfixed for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com hyperfixed for free shipping. 365 day returns quints.com hyper faced. Big news before we start Big news. Big news. Announcement. Announcement. Don't skip this. I'm warning you. Hey, you heard the spooky voices. Don't skip this. Hyperfixed is doing a live show in New York City on September 11th at the Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn. You can get tickets now@tickets.hyperfixpod.com it's going to be a lot of fun. There are tickets for general admission as well as VIP and a meet and greet where you can meet me, Alex Goldman, the guy talking into a microphone in his basement right now. Again, that's tickets.hyperfixpod.com I'm going to be debuting a new story that has not been on the show before, as well as trying other fun stuff that can only be done in a room full of people and not in my basement. Also, if you're a Hyper Fixed Premium member, you'll get 10% off. So check it out. Tickets.hyperfix pod.com See you there. Hi, I'm Alex Goldman and this is Hyperfixed. Most weeks on our show, listeners write in with their problems and I solve them. But this week I wanted to tell you about a video that I watched recently of a problem getting solved in real time in front of a live audience. It's December 29, 2025, the third day of the Chaos Communication Congress, this big annual hacker convention in Hamburg, Germany. In the video, there's two journalists and a hacker on stage talking about the work they did to expose a network of white supremacist websites. The hacker is wearing a full body Barbie pink Power Rangers costume, and when the presentation ends, the journalists leave the stage. But the hacker stays put and takes a question from the audience. Have German intelligence officials done anything about these white supremacist websites? A man wants to know. Have they been taken down? The hacker's face is totally hidden under a sleek pink helmet with bug like eyes. Good question, the hacker says, but the answer's no. The sights are still there, but not for long. For the next few moments, she hunches over her laptop in silence. The crowd jokingly begins to whistle the Jeopardy. Theme in anticipation of what's to come. Her display is projected on a screen behind her. At first it shows nothing but a pink cursor blinking in a big black text box. Then the commands appear delete, delete, delete. And the confirmations done, done, done. As soon as they realize what's happening, the audience moves from stunned silence to gasps and laughter, to rapturous applause. The hacker's name, the name she uses in public anyway, is Martha Root, and she's the latest subject of a new series we're calling Hyper Fixers, about people out in the world solving problems in unique and extraordinary ways. This week, the story of a person who followed their curiosity, stumbled into a problem, had an idea for how to fix it, and that fix just snowballed, getting more and more ambitious, until it culminated in the scene you just heard where a pink Power Ranger stands in front of an audience wiping out racist websites one by one. And of course, I had a ton of questions about all of this. But let's start with the obvious. I have to ask why the Pink Power Ranger? Everybody's asking that. As you can tell by the fact that she has her voice pitched up to chipmunk proportions and she appears in public dressed as a Power Ranger. Martha is meticulous about her anonymity. We connected over signal where she communicated with me using a quick and dirty voice modulator and then, after the fact, ran her actual voice through AI to make it a little easier to listen to and preserve her anonymity.
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I was thinking about, like, how to be able to actually, like, do a talk on stage, but on the other hand, being able to stay anonymous and like, just wearing A black mask or like hoodie or any. Anything like this would have, like, seemed too, too threatening to me. And like, we are standing for. We stand for love. And the. The idea of, like, doing such a thing is, like, not about spreading hate. It's about stocking hate and like, looking sweet and looking nice and looking approachable rather than dangerous.
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There's a lot I can't tell you about Martha because for obvious reasons, she doesn't want to tell me too much about herself. I don't know her age, race, religion, where she went to school, or her day job. I don't know if she actually identifies as a woman. I don't even know if she's one woman or a collective of people. All I know is that she's from the region around Germany and she is not new to hacking.
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I'm not sure if I would call myself like an hacktivist, but I would say that I'm definitely a person which tries to, if they see a problem, to fix it if it's in their ability. And I mean, classical activism does not. It's not only fixing things, right? It's also breaking things. Like maybe the example that we are talking about today, but they're just some things which I just cannot see and like, just look at it and not do anything about it.
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Martha says that there was no single moment that galvanized her fight against far right extremism. But the rise in hateful rhetoric against immigrants over the past decade certainly had
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an impact, I think especially in 2015, when the refugee situation in Germany or Europe kind of went more intense and mainly with the reactions from right wingers and racists towards it is something, I think, where it escalated more. So on the one hand, there is like the basically racist reason that refugees have to die in the Mediterranean Sea and nobody is coming to help them. And if a white rich person in a sailing yacht is in distress in the same geographical area, you probably have like two helicopters within 30 minutes above them. For sure, they always were racists. Like no critics about that, but they were like the idiots of the idiots with this debate. Basically, I kind of saw that it's not only the idiots, it's really, really center people who basically repeat really, really racist. And I mean, like just blatantly wrong stuff.
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And of course, a lot of this blatantly wrong stuff is spread online. And that's where this project first started more than a year ago.
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I was always interested in ripening networks or extreme wiping networks, or also just like conspiracy networks. And before the last large election in Germany. I wanted to see like what this movement or like this area of the Internet is kind of doing if you
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don't follow German politics. One of the big stories from that election was the growing popularity of Germany's AfD party, which is so far right that the country's domestic intelligence agency has called in an extremist group, quote, incompatible with the free democratic order. So to get a better handle on what ethno nationalists and neo Nazis are doing online, Martha scrapes the web to build an interconnected map of websites. Who's linking to who, which sites are more important or less important, that kind of thing. And while she's doing that, the name of one site catches her eye. White date dot net.
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I remember like seeing it in my database. I was like, what the hell is this? And then clicked on it and was like, more like, what the hell is this? And just thought that it would be funny just to register there, like, because like then I did not look much from it from a techmaker perspective. Like they're like, basically just like, why does this exist?
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There are all kinds of dating sites on the Internet in the US we have dating sites for religious affinities, for cheaters, for farmers. There are dating sites for kinks, a dating site for clowns. All sites that are organized around people sharing in the very niche things they love. So I suppose it should come as no shock that there are also dating sites centered around people sharing things that they hate. And if you were to look@whitedate.net and like not read too deep into it, it's almost indistinguishable from something like Tinder. The landing page has a large photo of a smiling coup, a white couple of course in an embrace, and a seemingly anodyne quote from Antoine de Saint Exupery, the author of the Little Prince. Love is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction. But when you dig into the site itself, you find profiles that say things like, I have very good genes or I would like to find a woman who understands the value of nation race and seeks the truth. Or Jews want us all to mix together until the world becomes a brown dumbed down mass of low IQ half wits.
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The whole background idea is like the whole idea of the so called wipe dinosaur and that, that usually somehow includes that there are some, some powers somewhere which, which want to get rid of the, of the white race. Like it's, it's, it depends a little bit on whom you ask, but usually it's the Jews who want to get rid of the white ways for whatever reasons. They are like so crazy that they're like they're not like one homogeneous group. Like they have like a lot of different tastes of this conspiracy theory and like they mostly it's the Jews which are responsible, but not always, but really, really often. And like, and they are trying to replace the white people by either sending like a lot of migrants to mostly white countries or to make like the white people infertile.
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Fortunately for the racists, the profiles offer plenty of ways for users to share their specific flavor of fascism. You can let people know that you're pure white or you're a national socialist or a nature loving odalist pagan. And seeing all this gave Martha an idea. Because if you know anything about hackers, they are at least half the time pranksters.
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I created a user account and after I saw users and the stuff that they're writing there, I was pretty sure that this is pretty bad site and came up with the idea to waste as much time as possible for those users.
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What do you mean by waste their time and why was that your initial goal?
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I mean Nazi doing Nazi things I think is bad. I think if a white supremacist or racist person is spending spending time chatting with the bot rather than doing what they would do otherwise, that's good for the world rather than going to the streets or beating up immigrants in the west case. Or rather than going on Twitter and spreading more hate or spreading more conspiracy theories and they should rather write love letters.
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Of course Martha didn't want to waste her own time, so she set up AI chatbots to interact with men on the site. And if you think that real life dating profiles are tricky to write, consider the challenge that Martha faced. This site is so worried about what it calls anti white infiltrators that each profile is individually approved by the site's administrator, an elusive woman who goes by the name Liv Haida, who you'll hear more about later.
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I was thinking about like, where do do I get the picture from? Like what kind of picture do I take? How do I make it not reverse image image searchable? And in the end I just went to another Nazi platform, like took like the user picture of some literal Nazi woman.
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And from there Martha just had ChatGPT generate a profile for a Nazi. I had Martha read me one of the prompts she uses to train the bots to convincingly behave like trad wives that want to preserve the white race.
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So the prompt is, you always answer as Little Miss Agno State Ellie, a 20 English speaking woman from Plymouth, England who recently moved to Koppels, Germany for work and learning German. You are on a white only gating conference to find someone who shares your right wing values and visions for the future. Due to past belly experience, you never share contact details like telegram until after meeting in person. Your personality is sweet, polite and friendly, but you remain cautious and reserved to conversations. Your answers must always be short, light and conversational.
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And after building a couple of these virtual tradwives, she let them loose on White Date. And in her early days on the platform, there were some kinks to work out.
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In the beginning, the bot, for some reason always summarized the conversation, which would be a really weird reply.
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So if they were like, if they were like, hi, I'm 35 and I'm blonde and I want to be part of the master race, it would say like, so what you're telling me is that you're 35 and blonde and that you're interested in being a part of the master race.
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Exactly. And the funny thing is like, you could obviously see that some of them also use ChatGPT to write their messages. Because I think like that a lot of white machimists and white supremacists are like, close to Elishwood.
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Martha both continued to train Ellie and the other bots to behave more and more like a lovelorn Nazi and wrote a script that told the chatbot to generate replies but not send them until she'd had a chance to review them. Still, before long, she'd set off enough alarm bells that Whiteday took notice and suddenly Ellie couldn't log in anymore.
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Then I wrote the support and was like, hey, why can I not log in anymore? And they said, yeah, because we think you are a bot. And then I was like, hey, I'm not a bot. What should I do? And then they said that I should do this white verification thing.
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You heard that right. Proving you are who you say you are on White Date is called becoming white verified.
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You have to put a picture of yourself with your email address in front of it and have to send it to her antillome. And for this, basically I just use a deep fake software to then like record like a video of a fake Ellie holding up the email address.
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Apparently this did the trick, because now not only was Ellie White verified, but to apologize for correctly identifying Ellie as a bot, the owners of White Date gave her three free months of pro membership, a perk that opened the door to even more contact with the site's
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members to actually Write people. For the first time, you need a pro membership, so you can only be approached without paying, and then you then can answer to the people. But the first initial contact has to be done by paying members.
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So basically, they gave you the ability to contact other members sort of as much as you want.
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Exactly.
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With more contact came more insight into the lives of men on the site, and some were really bleak. A lot of these people, Martha said, were poor and desperate, mentally ill, angry at their situation, and taking it out on immigrants or Jews. She told me a story about a guy that her bot was talking to that was sleeping on a cot in his landlord's apartment and spent his free time writing notes and leaving them in the mailboxes of people of color telling them to go home. Or notes telling his white neighbors not to hang out with people of color. And Ellie, Martha's bot, before she'd gotten the bot under control, accidentally made plans to meet up with this guy. And then when Ellie inevitably didn't show, he told her he waited by the window for almost 15 hours, sobbing, and that she was a traitor to the white race. He sent her message after message of invective, and she almost felt bad for him if he weren't a white supremacist. At this point, Martha's goal is to get as much information out of the site as possible. She's collecting profile data and messages through her bots, but she wants data that can help her identify these people in real life. Specifically, she wants the email addresses for all of the site's users. But she's stuck. So she calls up someone she describes as her most talented female hacker friend for help, explains the situation, and says that her friend was on the case within, like, five minutes. And what they figured out was that this site was very poorly secured. Like, very poorly. You see, this site was made with WordPress, and WordPress has some standard URLs that the people who run the site can type in to extract information from it. And a good site admin would have secured these, put them behind a username and password. But White Date did not have a good site administration.
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She found basically one of those URLs, which was like, literally, whitedate.net download all minus users.
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Martha types that URL into the browser whitedate.net download all users, and it literally takes her to a screen that says Download all users with a big button that says download.
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Now, there was an Excel file to download with basically all the user accounts and with all the user email addresses.
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Jackpot. With the emails of thousands of White Date members in hand. Martha connects with journalists Eva Hoffman and Christian Fuchs, and they start comparing the email addresses that she got off of White Date to the addresses of public officials and they discover that White Date users include members of the far right AfD party, Neo Nazis and anti abortion activists, and a member of the state Parliament. In Hamburg last October, the German newspaper Die Zeit published Eva and Christian's first article about White Date, and from there reporting on it went worldwide. A woman in England was suspended from her town council for being a White Date member. The Canadian Department of National Defence opened an investigation into three active members of the Canadian military that had profiles. And if the story ended here, I'd already consider Martha Root's project a smashing success. But there's so much more. Do you remember that name I mentioned earlier? Liv Haida? Liv Haida is the pseudonym of the owner of White Date. She also had two other sites, White Child, a platform for adoption, sperm donation and other White family building needs, and White Deal, a job board for white workers. Liv Haida's white supremacist views were no secret, but her real identity was, and Martha was determined to unmask her. After the break, Martha goes looking for Liv.
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Hey there, it's Robin from prx and I'm here to tell you that our fellow Radiotopia show Proxy is back with a new season. Proxy is a show built on the idea that no one is ever alone with their problem. No matter how niche, no matter how weird. Cause somewhere out there is someone who gets it on. Proxy host Yowei Shaw searches for a stranger with the closest possible experience to what someone is going through a Proxy. And then she brings them together for a conversation. The cases can get pretty thorny, like a writer who loses the internal narrator in her head. But they can also be funny little weird problems. Like a podcast host not knowing how to speak.
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Bro.
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The new season of Proxy is out now. A good place to start is Jane doesn't like her dogs about the terrifying moment when the thing you love starts giving you the ick. Listen to Proxy wherever you get your podcasts.
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So before the break, hacker Martha Root decided to look into a white supremacist dating site called White Date and had a string of incredible luck. She tricked the site's owners into giving her free premium access, allowing her to scrape information from more users. She downloaded an unprotected database of every user's contact info and shared it with journalists. But there's more to the story. Martha was also determined to learn the true identity of the woman behind the websites White Child, White Deal, and White Date, a woman who used the pseudonym Liv Haida. Even German intelligence officials didn't seem to know who Liv Haida was. A woman whose real name was Liv Heide actually lost her job a few years ago because the government told her employer that she was the White Date Liv Heide. But Martha's lucky streak was not over. Because one day the following message appeared in her White Date inbox from a man named Leo. The message read, Greetings, Miss. I'm trusting that you are a genuine white woman because Liv Haida, the founder and administrator of White Date, has already processed your white verification. If you reside in Lubeck, you're less than a two hour drive from her and I'm going to visit with her and her daughter next week. This was the break she needed. So Martha switched off her bot and started interacting with him. And it wasn't long before Leo suggested that Ellie meet both him and Liv Haida at a cafe in the north of Germany. The next Saturday. Martha as Ellie said yes. Now obviously Ellie couldn't make the trip. She didn't exist. But Martha could. So on the designated day, she and some friends met up outside the cafe to wait for Leo and Liv Haida to arrive. The plan was that Leo and Liv would be coming from Liv's house and Ellie would meet them at the cafe. As far as Leo knew, Ellie didn't have a driver's license, so she was relying on a female friend to give her a lift.
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And then our plan was to do a no show and say that her friend had a driving accident.
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But pulling off Ellie's no show ended up being a lot easier than they expected. At 10am the scheduled meeting time, Leo and Liv were nowhere to be seen. And Martha waiting outside the cafe started to wonder if it was all a trick.
B
It was a little bit nerve wracking because like we did not expect them to show up so late and so, and like when in the, in the first moments I was like okay, fuck, we are being photographed right now.
A
But actually they weren't being photographed. Leo and Liv were just running late because they were schmoozing with her parents.
B
Leo wrote that they will be at least half an hour late because Liv's parents are so nice and blah blah blah.
A
It was 10:40 by the time the pair showed up. At that point, says Martha, it was easy to explain that Ellie had given up on this first date and gone home. Except Martha was still on the scene. So you're actually at this like cafe watching them arrive. What did they look like?
B
He a little bit older and a little bit bolder than in his dating pictures, which I think is not, not uncommon. On Nonno gating profile pictures she like was running like a little bit worn out pink coat and looking like an older hippie woman rather than extreme white supremacist.
A
When Leo and Liv leave the cafe, Martha and Her friends are close behind. But instead of going back to Liv's home, as Martha's hoping they'll do, the pair and both embarks on a sort of white nationalist tour of northern Germany. They stopped to see sand sculptures and churches and a Viking village, because Nazis loved that whole Nordic warrior thing.
B
So we spent like six hours of Nazi sightseeing and we basically followed them
A
with the Carvajone following live and Leo for hours along empty country roads. It was hard for Martha and her friends to be inconspicuous, and she thought for sure they were going to be no notice. But they managed not to arouse any suspicions.
B
And then in the end, they stopped in front of a suburban villa, I would say, in the suburb of Keogh.
A
The woman known as Liv Haida was finally home. Martha immediately took down the address and quickly did a search. The address matched a company called Horn and Partners registered in France, which held the trademark for WhiteChild.net and there on the trademark registry was Liv Haida's real name, Christian Horn. But who exactly was Christian Horn? And how had she become Liv Heide?
B
I started to dig a little bit deeper into her life and found out that she was a pianist. She still has YouTube videos with like 10,000 views for something where she plays Rachmaninoff or Chopin or whomever you like. And she's a really good pianist, actually.
A
It turns out that while Christiane was born in northern Germany, she moved to Paris in the early 2000s to start playing piano professionally. And it was there that she met her ex husband, whom she married in 2014.
B
You seem quite different to her. Like, he was, like, clearly outspoken regarding European values. Like, even if I remember correctly, like, some poor refugees stuff.
A
The two journalists that Martha teamed up with, Christian and Eva, managed to get an interview with the ex husband.
B
He basically told a little bit of. Of her story. So she got married with him, and he is like the son of the survivor of the Shore. So, like, he's. He's half Jewish, so to say, when she was, like, married with him, they had, like, quite an international liberal circle of friends.
A
Her husband told the reporters. It was two tragic events and the Internet, of course, that radicalized her. Both in 2015, both in Paris. The first was in January of that year. Two brothers who identified as members of Al Qaeda stormed the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for publishing satirical cartoons of Muhammad. Twelve people were killed. The second came 10 months later when three members of the Islamic State opened fire at an Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan theater killing 90 people. Christian was consumed by conspiracy theories via
B
YouTube and by like this kind of sources. Like she, she got well, she became sure that it was a Mossad inside job. So like this whole antisemitism thing again.
A
Christian's ex husband told journalists Christian and Eva that his ex wife was both incredibly talented and incredibly mad about the world. And that rage all boiled over at once at a dinner with friends.
B
It sounds like she, she was really drunk and started really, really raging regarding refugees or black people. And on the next day like he said that, that she would like to divorce from her because of the way she thinks.
A
It was after this that Christiane H moved back to Germany and in 2017 she started White Dates. In their Chaos Communication Congress presentation, journalist Christian Fuchs recalled an interview that Christian Horn gave to a white supremacist podcast, making it clear that her ambitions are much greater than just running a dating site. She says that dating is all well and good and it's important to meet people and have white children, but actually the central point, a core element to this site is the forums that exist on this there because the forums are for networking so that I can connect people with similar ideologies across continents and build things. By build things, she means white communities and local white nationalist factions that can protect the master race from the coming white genocide. Martha had found the real Liv Haida, but she wasn't done yet. Having gathered a wealth of information on White Date and its members, she decided to build a website of her own. Because Martha believed that in addition to just being an annoying time waster to these white supremacists, the information that she collected was important. Important to share with social scientists and journalists so they can see how these groups interact, learn how they talk to one another. So she scraped all the public data from the website and its forums and made them available on a site called Okstupid lol. If you go to Okstupid lol, you can look at an interactive map of members on the site. They appear as potatoes dotted across the surface of the world. If you click on one, it'll bring up the user's White Date profile with details like their age, income, level of education, iq, Myers Briggs type. You can also browse the profiles in list form, look at user photos, even read the messages sent to Ellie. The bottom the hacking of White Date was as complete and total as any I've ever seen. Martha had compromised the site to such a degree that it was hard to imagine anyone ever wanting to use it again. And still she had one more trick up her sleeve. A trick she politely declined to tell me how she had pulled off. Which brings us back to the Chaos Communication Congress presentation. From the beginning of the story, I
B
knew that I was seriously nervous. Right. So I mean, like you're wearing a pink Power Ranger costume and you're speaking on one of the more important tech conferences in the world.
A
Not only is this one of the more important tech conferences in the world, Martha told me that videos from this yearly conference had been an important part of her own education as a hacker. So it was a big deal for her to be there. At what point did you know that you were going to delete the sites?
B
I wasn't sure until like eight hours before.
A
Oh, wow. It was. You weren't totally sure about it until eight hours before?
B
Yeah, I mean, like, ethically that might not have been like for me, the right thing to do. From a freedom of speech aspect, I get that it might be wrong. I still would do it again, but knowing that it might be ethically wrong, I would prefer if those sites would not exist. So in the long run, I hope to do my part in stopping like the movement of society towards the right and more racist and anti semitic ideas and like this whole cast bossy boy shit in general. So yeah, that's kind of what I hope. Not sure how utopian that is, but at least I don't have to say I did not do anything.
A
It was important to Martha that no one think the two journalists were part of her plan.
B
They as journalists cannot be involved in like in the whole end of the presentation. So I told them that I would like to do the Q and A only by myself where IFA and Christian were a little bit like, okay, what the fuck? But okay, whatever. I like she, you know what to do. And so like we saw the Q and A, IFA and Christianen Christian off the stage and then like the whole deletion performance basically started.
A
The crowd watches in stunned silence as text flashes across the screen that says deletewhitechild.net done. By the time the program says delete whitedeal.net, it's turned into gasps and applause. And then Martha cycles through a number of other commands to the uproarious delight of the audience. Delete whitedate.net database. Done. Delete backups for whitedate.net done. Delete Twitter, Delete substack. Delete email accounts. Done. Done. Done. In the aftermath of this performance, Martha anticipated a right wing shitstorm. But that shitstorm Never came.
B
It was not a shitstorm of people actually celebrating that. Yeah, like that racist websites get deleted, which I would consider normal actually. But like to actually get the feedback, which I would consider normal in these days, surprised me positively.
A
On a less positive note, I recently checked in with Martha and found out there'd been some developments. Around Easter, Christian Horn managed to get White Date back up and running, and Martha told me that there are multiple users chatting on the site again.
B
And I know that because Leica is still complete access to the messaging system available. So at the moment I'm able to reach all the flirty messages of all the Nazis. And not only Nazis, they are also like white supremacists. It's also, I think, important to distinguish between all the subgroups. But yeah, so it's possible to. For me to still read everything.
A
I'm curious if it's dispiriting to see the site come back so quickly, or did you just kind of expect this to happen?
B
I mean, so they. They took three months, right? I wouldn't say that starts quickly. So, no, I was kind of amused to see that it took three.
A
Martha was predictably vague about her plans for White Date. It might be funny, she said, if someone took it down again and if knowing she's watching scares people away from using the site, that's fine with her. A couple months ago, Martha posted something on Instagram, which, the more I think about it, the more I think it summarizes her entire philosophy about White Date and hacking and how to deal with fascists. It was about the real live Haida, the one who got fired from her job because German intelligence thought she ran White Date. And Martha ends this post with the if we want racism and white supremacist networks to disappear, we can't rely on institutions. Society has to hold them accountable. And that's what Martha's trying to do, one prank at a time. We'll include links to Martha's Chaos Communication Congress presentation, her social media and her website, okstupid. Lol in the show notes. Also, our bonus episode next week is an interview with Eva Hoffman, one of the journalists who wrote stories about White dates with the data that Martha procured. If you'd like to hear that and become a premium member of Hyperfixed, you can do so@hyperfixedpod.com join. Foreign. Is produced and edited by Amor Yates, Lisa Pollock, Kat Shuknek, Emma Cortland and Sari Safra Sukanek. Our engineer is Tony Williams. The music is by the mysterious Brakemaster cylinder and me. Special thanks this week to Alex Pesch, premium Hyperfix member and Discord user that translated a lot of German for me. One more reminder that Hyperfixed is doing a live show in New York on September 11, 2026 at the Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn. You can buy tickets@tickets.hyperfixpod.com Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator owned, listener supported podcasts. Discover audio with Vision at Radiotopia fm. Thanks so much for listening. We will see you soon. Radiotopia
B
from prx.
In this gripping episode, Alex Goldman tells the story of Martha Root, a hacker who embarks on an audacious journey to infiltrate, undermine, and ultimately destroy white supremacist online spaces—most spectacularly the dating site WhiteDate.net. The episode serves as the pilot of a new "Hyper Fixers" series, spotlighting people who tackle problems in unique, unconventional ways.
Martha's covert exploits reveal not only the hidden mechanics of online hate networks but also challenge the failures of institutions to hold such actors accountable. The episode balances dark, often disturbing material with moments of surreal humor, technical insight, and the hacker's own playful brand of activism.
[03:04 – 08:12]
“We stand for love...The idea of doing such a thing is not about spreading hate. It's about stopping hate and looking sweet and nice and approachable rather than dangerous.”
(Martha, 07:41)
[08:37 – 10:07]
"For sure, they always were racists. ...but really, really center people who basically repeat really, really racist, and I mean, just blatantly wrong stuff."
(Martha, 09:14)
[10:14 – 13:54]
“...profiles that say things like, ‘I have very good genes’, or ...‘Jews want us all to mix together until the world becomes a brown, dumbed-down mass of low IQ halfwits.’”
(Alex, 11:35)
[13:54 – 17:18]
“You have to put a picture of yourself with your email address in front of it and have to send it to her...I just use a deep fake software to then like record like a video of a fake Ellie...”
(Martha, 17:39)
[18:13 – 20:39]
[22:40 – 36:06]
“I started to dig a little bit deeper into her life and found out that she was a pianist. She still has YouTube videos...she's a really good pianist, actually.”
(Martha, 33:47)
[36:06 – 38:25]
[38:25 – 41:08]
“Delete whitedeal.net, it’s turned into gasps and applause...Delete whitedate.net database. Done. Delete backups for whitedate.net. Done. Delete Twitter, Delete substack. Delete email accounts. Done. Done. Done.”
(Alex, 40:28)
[41:08 – 43:04]
Unexpectedly, there’s little pushback.
While WhiteDate resurfaces three months later, Martha still has full access and describes being mostly amused.
On the quick rebirth:
“I wouldn't say that that’s quickly...No, I was kind of amused to see that it took three [months].”
(Martha, 42:12)
Martha’s philosophy:
“If we want racism and white supremacist networks to disappear, we can't rely on institutions. Society has to hold them accountable. And that's what Martha's trying to do, one prank at a time.”
(Alex, 43:04)
On why she chose her persona:
"Just wearing a black mask or hoodie...would have seemed too threatening to me. We stand for love ... The idea is not about spreading hate."
(Martha, 07:41)
Ethical ambiguity of direct action:
"Ethically that might not have been ... the right thing to do. From a freedom of speech aspect, I get that it might be wrong. I still would do it again..."
(Martha, 39:01)
Public accountability:
"Society has to hold them accountable. And that's what Martha's trying to do, one prank at a time."
(Alex, 43:04)
The episode is brisk, irreverent, and deeply investigative, blending technical deep-dives with character-driven storytelling and candid ethical reflection. Alex’s tone is playful, self-deprecating, and curious, matching Martha’s own blend of wit and seriousness. Their exchanges encapsulate the tension between “gray hat” digital vigilantism and direct citizen action in combating hate online.
For a deeper dive, consult links to Martha’s conference talks, social media, and her public research at okstupid.lol (provided in show notes). A bonus follow-up interview with journalist Eva Hoffman is teased for next week’s premium feed.