Racist hackers target black DC teens participating in NASA competition

WASHINGTON (ABC7) — Mikayla Sharrieff, India Skinner and Bria Snell, juniors at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School in Northwest Washington, are the only East Coast finalists in NASA’s Optimus Prime Spinoff Promotion and Research Challenge (OPSPARC).

For their community service hours, the teens worked with Inclusive Innovation Incubator on a project to remove metals, including lead, from water to make it drinkable.

While NASA was impressed with the teens' project, on Sunday, an anonymous group launched a campaign on racist websites to get members of the public to go on NASA's site to vote for a particular team of boys instead of the girls, who are black.

NASA saw the surge and stopped the voting.

Following the incident, NASA released the following statement:

"On Sunday, April 29, hackers attempted to change the vote totals in the NASA OPSPARC Challenge, so managers of the challenge decided to end public voting to protect the integrity of the results. The challenge team has an accurate record of the voting results prior to the attempted disruption. The top three Public Choice teams in each category will be notified and recognized on the challenge website. In accordance with the judging criteria and voting procedures stated on the OPSPARC website, a panel of NASA Goddard judges will make a final determination of the winners using the published rubrics.

Before the voting ended, members of the public were using social media to generate support for particular teams in the public voting. NASA supports this kind of community-based effort to encourage students to engage with science, technology, engineering and math and recognizes social media as an important tool for that support. Votes generated this way are legitimate and will be counted. Unfortunately, it was brought to NASA’s attention yesterday that some members of the public used social media, not to encourage students and support STEM, but to attack a particular student team based on their race and encouraged others to disrupt the contest and manipulate the vote, and the attempt to manipulate the vote occurred shortly after those posts. NASA continues to support outreach and education for all Americans, and encourages all of our children to reach for the stars."

On Thursday, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser committed $4,000 to Sharrieff, Skinner and Snell.

The money will help the team "continue to build on their innovative project."

“Through their brilliance and passion, Mikayla, India, and Bria are bringing our vision for In3 to life and making our city proud,” Bowser said in a statement. “Mikayla, India, and Bria are just the type of people and scientists our world needs more of and we are proud to support their dreams.”