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Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter
- Osseric 9y ago“A large number of people have blocked you in response to high volumes of untargeted, unsolicited, or duplicative content or engagements from your account,” we were informed. This was true; Impostor Buster had been blocked by many neo-Nazis. “A large number of spam complaints have been filed against you.” Yes, by neo-Nazis. “You send large numbers of unsolicited replies or mentions.” Yes, to neo-Nazis. What are the accuracy metrics of the bot? Is he really sure that the bot is only sending stuff to neo-Nazis? Are you allowed to spam someone because they hold a morally reprehensible position?
- CalChris 9y agoIt wasn't simply the morally reprehensible position. It was also the act of impersonation. The bot identified impersonation.
- Osseric 9y agoOk, so does impersonation allow you to be spammed? It seems like impersonation is non-consequential, or at least hard to measure. Especially on such an ephemeral platform.
- CalChris 9y agoIf you are going to dismiss impersonation on such an ephemeral platform, why do you care about spamming?
- sydd 9y agoIn most platforms impersonating a living person is against the TOS. If twitter were doing their job, they would ban them.
- grasshopperpurp 9y agoYour sympathies are very telling.
- subjectsigma 9y agoAre you seriously insinuating this user is a neo-Nazi because he's trying to have a polite conversation about what is and is not ethical? That's shameful.
- grasshopperpurp 9y agoOf course not. Why would you jump to that conclusion? When you see someone with a "Thin Blue Line" decal on their car, do you assume that he/she is a police officer who murders minorities? No, but you know where their allegiance rests. As CalChris said: >If you are going to dismiss impersonation on such an ephemeral platform, why do you care about spamming? Maybe you didn't read enough of the replies to understand the context. I don't know.
- subjectsigma 9y agoI think it's pretty easy to see that impersonation has negative consequences. How would you feel if someone impersonated you to your employer, family, or friend, and said something disagreeable? I do agree that "They broke the rules" might not be a good justification for further rule-breaking.
- pzone 9y agoTechnically it's not impersonation. The trolls are creating fake personae, but not stealing anyone's identity.
- kenjackson 9y agoOnce you use a real person's picture w/o their consent, I think you're walking a fine line between a fake persona and impersonation.
- hateduser2 9y agoIs abuse a position?
- Osseric 9y agoI'm not sure I understand your question in relation to my statement. I'm trying to imply that these people abuse and harass people because of their morally reprehensible position, and they're identified and targeted by the "bot" or other people and labelled by their position, not because they're abusers. Even if they didn't abuse or harass they would still be condemned for their position, or maybe they wouldn't be. I tend to lean on the former.
- hateduser2 9y agoThe people who the bot targeted were impersonating Jews and spreading anti Semitic. That’s not a position, that’s abuse. Is the relevance clear now?
- mcguire 9y ago"The con goes like this: The impersonator lifts an online photo of a Jew, Muslim, African-American or other minority — typically one with clear identifying markers, like a yarmulke-clad Hasid or a woman in hijab. Using that picture as a Twitter avatar, the bigot then adds ethnic and progressive descriptors to the bio: “Jewish,” “Zionist,” “Muslim,” “enemy of the alt-right.” "False identity forged, the trolls then insert themselves into conversations with high-profile Twitter users — conversations that are often seen by tens of thousands of followers — and proceed to say horrifically racist things... "Using a crowdsourced database of impersonator accounts, carefully curated by us to avoid any false positives, the bot patrolled Twitter and interjected whenever impostors tried to insinuate themselves into a discussion." While I see your point about accuracy and don't necessarily buy the "carefully curated" part, I wouldn't describe the described behavior as "spam" either.
- Osseric 9y agoI agree. But twitter seemingly categorized it as such, maybe not spam to a singular user(s). But spam in the sense that it's volume was overwhelming? Maybe there is that many neo-nazis? I'm just not buying into the same things you are.
- DangsBane 9y agohttp://cultstate.com/2017/10/13/The-Butterfly-War/ http://cultstate.com/2017/10/13/The-Butterfly-War/ The more you hunt with your "carefully curated lists", the more you'll seek to improve its efficiency by creating a companion list of acceptable black behavior, acceptable gay behavior, acceptable Jewish behavior, etc. You'll end up relying on cyber phrenology in the end and violate the civil rights of those you seek to protect... just to maintain your waning influence to win points in an attention economy you don't even have meaningful shares in. All approaches to this challenge will inevitably end up targeting black people because they didn't generate black enough meta data. Oh yes, we will go down that road and we'll do it together, all in the name of your infallible moral supremacy. <3 Enjoy the trap. It took me years to set it up. :D
- spiderfarmer 9y agoYou’re only making sense to yourself and less intelligent people.
- DangsBane 9y agohttp://cultstate.com/2017/10/13/The-Butterfly-War/ http://cultstate.com/2017/10/13/The-Butterfly-War/ The more you hunt with your "carefully curated lists", the more you'll seek to improve its efficiency by creating a companion list of acceptable black behavior, acceptable gay behavior, acceptable Jewish behavior, etc. You'll end up relying on cyber phrenology in the end and violate the civil rights of those you seek to protect... just to maintain your waning influence to win points in an attention economy you don't even have meaningful shares in. All approaches to this challenge will inevitably end up targeting black people because they didn't generate black enough meta data. Oh yes, we will go down that road and we'll do it together, all in the name of your infallible moral supremacy. <3 Enjoy the trap. It took me years to set it up. :D
- QAPereo 9y agoNote the username and just ignore the troll. I have faith that the account will be dead soon.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- creaghpatr 9y agoCouldn't the bot just report the imposter accounts instead of engage them? Pretty sure it's against TOS to impersonate someone without declaring it a parody account.
- GuB-42 9y agoThe problem is that the bot has only a single voice against a whole community. Twitter trusts the numbers, in a sense, it is very democratic. Trolls are simply very good at strategic voting.
- kevin_b_er 9y agoThis is now an internet classic. Here's an article from 2014 where critics of Vietnam's government were hit with "report abuse" spam to silence them. https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/2/6083647/facebook-s-report-abuse-button-has-become-a-tool-of-global-oppression https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/2/6083647/facebook-s-report-... Or perhaps you've heard of "Youtube Heroes"? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/09/23/new-youtube-offensive-on-offensiveness-offends-so-many-it-disables-comments/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/09/2... All you need is an appropriate mob to target politics it doesn't like to shut it down with these automated social media systems. And it can always be abused by your enemies.
- sean_anandale 9y agoCompare & contrast to "fellow white people".
- drawnwren 9y agoThis seems like a legitimate use case for the DMCA. Why not just use the bot to issue DMCA notices? These accounts are clearly violating copyright.
- drawnwren 9y agoAlternatively, Grass Roots the posting. Twitter's problem is that the bot is posting, so set up a third party site that identifies tweets and ask legitimate users to respond to them.
- raguuu 9y agoYou have to be the actual copyright holder to do it. But in all seriousness, the whole Twitter thing is embarrassing. People waste their lives arguing and creating bots, entertaining trolls etc. Quit your Twitter bullshit America, it's embarrassing as Trump is.
- woodydeck 9y agoHaving a frog on your account most definitely does not mean you are a Nazi, but yes, the identitarians do meme Pepes that are racist. I am familiar with the author, he's a drama queen, but he's not incorrect there is a huge wave of antisemitism in the world. It's a daily battle. Ben Shapiro got a lot of racial abuse too, but its just part of living in a world with free speech. Most antisemitism comes not from Nazi sympathizing identitarians, but Muslim extremists. It's a real problem in Europe, and it's good to discuss. I really reject trying to delegitimize Trump supporters by throwing them all in with the alt-right. As a Jewish Kekistani, it infuriates me. I don't like identitarians, but they have a right to their views. I want everyone to be very clear on what terrible views they have so they don't get power. This sort of schlock in the NYT just makes things convoluted and people less likely to be able to discern who is friend, and who is foe.
- akhilcacharya 9y ago>As a Jewish Kekistani What the actual hell is happening to this country
- fnovd 9y ago>As a Jewish Kekistani, it infuriates me. I don't like identitarians, I can't tell if you're deliberately trolling or not, which I guess is the point you're trying to make.
- hateduser2 9y agoI guarantee you the abuse the author receives is not from Muslims.
- finnthehuman 9y ago>I’d received the second-most abuse of any Jewish journalist on Twitter during the campaign cycle. [...] As a result, I’ve become something of an unintentional expert on alt-right trolls and their tactics. Red flag: Blind man about to describe elephant. Not to be hasty, I didn't stop reading there. I stopped reading once I found out the author thinks he's moving the needle by ineptly fighting a blatantly-obvious disinformation campaign. On Twitter.
- marviel 9y ago> I’d received the second-most abuse of any Jewish journalist on Twitter during the campaign cycle. [...] As a result, I’ve become something of an unintentional expert on alt-right trolls and their tactics. > Red flag: Blind man about to describe elephant. Must one be an alt-right troll to describe one? But not to be hasty I'll skip that point for now... > I stopped reading once I found out the author thinks he's moving the needle by ineptly fighting a blatantly-obvious disinformation campaign. On Twitter. ... how is this blatantly obvious to the average user? It's simply not. The article describes duplicating a Twitter account by picture, name, and bio. Pic, bio and subject matter is about as deep as most people would go to identify a Twitter account as belonging to a given person. I wager that even a large portion of the busy people on this site wouldn't do any further due diligence to determine whether or not the targeted Twitter account was fake, or real, and thus would have horrible opinions of the author of this article.
- finnthehuman 9y ago>Must one be an alt-right troll to describe one? No, but this smells like the journos that in 2016, lurked /pol/ for a few hours and tried to work backwards to form a grand unified theory of Trump's win. Granted, that's more time than I've spent on /pol/, but it strikes me as what Matt Taibbi once called (paraphrasing) the lazy-sportswriter approach to political reporting. >how is this blatantly obvious to the average user? It's simply not It's obvious by the standards of internet propaganda campaigns. I'll admit that's not something typical users are even on guard against... >Pic, bio and subject matter is about as deep as most people would go to identify a Twitter account as belonging to a given person. Yeah, but the amount of stock people already put into Twitter users has never made any sense, either. I know there is a hypothetical ideal where a Twitter user you don't already know personally can be seen as less suspicious than "random Internet person," but that's not the world we live in. Even verified twitter users doesn't verify anything more than precisely which moron a set of brain-droppings came from. That doesn't make them right, or even make Twitter a useful way to take the temperature of society. Twitter perpetrates the lie that the platform can be modified to deliver the platform it can never realistically be. Both in the practices of the business named Twitter, and the actions of mass of users that have some of their professional value and/or fame tied to the idea of Twitter managing to find the mythical usefulness and trustworthiness among strangers long assumed to be impossible in large scale (online or IRL). This is all a meandering tangent about Twitter's place in society, but informs my previous statements about this article.
- CalChris 9y agoMods, can you look into why this and the Obama articles were flagged?
- dang 9y agoA bunch of users flagged it and a bunch of other users vouched for it. These were legit users so I assume it is a legit difference of opinion about whether the articles belong on HN. In case anyone is wondering, moderators didn't penalize either of the articles. We did ban the garden-variety trolls that showed up in this thread.
- rgejman 9y agoWhy was this article flagged?
- abritinthebay 9y agoHN has a surprisingly strong alt-right contingent, they’re just more subtle about it than Reddit.
- NelsonMinar 9y ago"Alt-right" is a surprisingly polite term for "Nazi sympathizer"
- abritinthebay 9y agoI’m using it mostly as a catch all from “actually a fucking Nazi” all the way to “trolling 4chan type college kid” But yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
- anabis 9y agoShould Twitter also freeze Trump parody accounts? Maybe saying parody on the profile makes it OK. Those anti-Semitic impostor accounts are probably still effective under that rule, since most people will not check a users profile.
- ry_ry 9y agoParody accounts are generally satirical, often humorous, and fairly open about their deception. Pretending to be jewish, to say unpleasant things and trick unsuspecting people into believing this is the view of a 'Jewish person' (quotes because the whole concept is very reductive at both ends of the interaction) is neither. I would also say the issue almost certainly isn't limited to Jew-impersonators either, but since that's what the article is about I used that example.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kbvk 9y agoSo it's okay to spam people if you don't like what they do?
- hateduser2 9y agoIf what they do is actively and solely intendedto be hostile to you (without provocation), yes.