alt Hacker NewsNone of your links allege that Hoan Ton-That or Richard Schwartz is a white supremacist. What the Huffington Post piece does allege, is that for 3 weeks Smartcheckr (a different LLC that would later have its assets transferred to Clearview AI) hired one Douglass Mackey. Douglass Mackey had an online alias "Richard Vaughn" that was used to post white supremacist content. Ton-That states that he was unaware that Mackey was the real person behind Richard Vaughn.
There's a vast gulf between "Clearview AI was founeded by white supremacists" and "Smartcheckr, which later merged with Clearview AI, employed for 3 weeks someone who posted white supremacist content under a pseudonym, unbeknownst to the Clearview AI founders".
In fact, neither the Buzzfeed article nor the NYTimes piece accuse anyone of white supremacy.
SmartCheckr was founded/owned by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz. So they transferred the assets of a company they already founded/owned to another company that they founded/owned: "Clearview AI was founded in 2017 by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz after transferring the assets of another company, SmartCheckr, which the pair originally founded in 2017 alongside Charles C. Johnson" [0].
Other notable white supremacists with material ties in the article:
Chuck Johnson [1] collaborated with Ton-That and "in contact about scraping social media platforms for the facial recognition business." Ran a white supremacist site (GotNews) and white supremacist crowd funding sites.
Douglass Mackey [2] a white supremacist who consulted for the company.
Tyler Bass [3] an employee and member of multiple white supremacist groups and Unite the Right attendee.
Marko Jukic [4], employee and syndicated author in a publication by white supremacist Richard Spencer.
The article also goes into the much larger ecosystem of AI and facial recognition tech and its ties to white supremacists and the far-right. So there are not just direct ties to Clearview AI itself, but a network of surveillance companies who are ideologically and financially tied to the founders and associates.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_C._Johnson
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglass_Mackey
[3] https://gizmodo.com/creepy-face-recognition-firm-clearview-a...
[4] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/clearview-ai-im...