Three black 17-year-old girls faced racism after being named as finalists in a NASA youth competition, when anonymous commenters tried to undermine their success.
The brouhaha began when the Washington D.C.-area high school students became finalists after entering a NASA-supported competition for which they developed a method to purify lead-contaminated drinking water, Fox News reported.
The three girls were the sole all-female, all-black group that was named as finalists in the NASA Goddard’s Optimus Prime Spinoff Promotion and Research Challenge.
But instead of congratulations, the three were bombarded with a flurry of racist comments by online trolls.
The girls, Mikayla Sharrieff, India Skinner and Bria Snell, tried to celebrate their achievements by texting, "Hidden figures in the making." This was in reference to "Hidden Figures," a film about black women who worked for NASA during the space race’s heydays of the 1960s.
The next phase of the competition involved public voting, and the teens turned to social media to drum up support, The Washington Post reported.
Anonymous posters on the internet forum 4chan worked against the team, posting racial epithets, claiming the girls were getting support solely because of their race, and suggesting hacking the voting to ensure that another team won, according to the Post.
NASA reported that the voting had indeed been compromised, but that the three girls still remained in the running among the eight groups of finalists.
"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 [science, technology, education and math], 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 said in a statement on the competition's website. Public voting was closed early as a result.
The final winners will be announced in May. The grand prize is $4,000 and a trip to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbeld, Maryland.
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