Anonymous posts Ku Klux Klan alleged sympathisers list

The hackers' collective Anonymous has shared details of about 1,000 alleged sympathisers of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan (KKK) on the internet.

Anonymous said the data was "a form of resistance" against racial violence, reports BBC News.

The KKK last year threatened to use "deadly force" against those protesting over the killing of a black youth in Ferguson, Missouri.

A list of alleged KKK members published earlier in the week appears to have been fake.

That list had incorrectly outed several US politicians as KKK members and was quickly followed by a denial from Anonymous's official Twitter account.

Thursday's list appears to detail social media profiles of people who had joined or "liked" KKK-related groups on Facebook and Google+. Many of the profiles featured racist imagery and slogans.

Anonymous said it had collected the names over the course of the last year, using a variety of ways, from "interviewing expert sources" and "digital espionage" to obtaining publicly-available information.

The group said those on the list included official members of various KKK groups "as well as their closest associates (most are also in other extremist hate groups)". Some were listed with their alleged aliases.

"Some members of this list are quite dangerous, sociopathic individuals. Others are not," Anonymous added in its statement accompanying the release of the list.

Some observers were not overly impressed by the list.

Mark Pitcavage, director of the US Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism,told Vice News it was "low-hanging fruit, basically public source information. For most of these people it's not a secret that they've been in the Klan."

He also said there were "all sorts of errors", including the mis-spelling of at least one person's name.