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Thanks, I hate it. One of those interesting side-effects of furry avatars that I noticed is that accounts bearing those avatars were always real people, with t

by nrr 6y ago

Thanks, I hate it. One of those interesting side-effects of furry avatars that I noticed is that accounts bearing those avatars were always real people, with the added bonus that you can generally authenticate the human behind the mask if you know how. The reality of being online today is that we have to understand whether we're interacting with real people or just a clever piece of software, and this is far more true for folks who are not technically savvy. Oddly enough, furries were the last bastion of humanity. (And a welcoming one at that, but I digress.) This complicates that heuristic somewhat. This brings furry avatars on the same level as human headshots. I now need to, e.g., read and process the full account bio and spend more time authenticating whom I interact with online. This is great work, but did you really have to?

URSpider94 6y ago
What?
- some_furry 6y ago
  > What? What nrr is saying is simply: If someone replies to a comment and they have a human avatar, there was always a chance it was the output of https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com Their heuristic for "if it's a furry avatar, it's probably not from a Russian troll farm" is now invalid.
  - URSpider94 6y ago
    Ok, thank you (and no offense meant to the OP) that makes sense in an odd way, and I’m clearly just not up on these things. I wasn’t aware that the corresponding fake-person generator was a thing, but of course it is. There’s something odd about the fact that a cartoon rendering would be more trustworthy than a photo. Then again, there’s always been the joke about people who keep the sample photo that comes in the picture frame to pretend they have a s.o. or family ...
- derefr 6y ago
  If you look at the profile pictures on Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, etc., they fall into a few categories: • fallback — e.g. the egg image on twitter • explicitly algorithmic — e.g. http://identicon.net/ http://identicon.net/ • logotypes — actual logos, icons, arbitrary aesthetically-pleasing typographical art • headshots of real people • photographs of real-life things — places, nature, buildings, etc. • crops from TV/film — headshots of actors playing characters, or whatever you'd call Baby Yoda • famous works of art — crops of prints of paintings, crops of photos of sculptures • commercially-marketable art — box art, movie posters, crops from cartoons/anime, professionally-commissioned CG paintings that fit the style of their source material • unknown, non-marketable art — works that are clearly either self-made, or commissioned as a one-off, where the work has traits that make it specific-enough to someone's tastes that it obviously would never have been produced as spec work without an arranged buyer/planned use The parent's point is that, for all the categories except the last, there's an obvious way to scrape or generate a million such images, that someone can include in their spambot/voting-ring registering algorithm. The last category, though—custom competent-but-not-commercial-looking illustrations—were, in some sense, a Proof of Work token for the profile it was attached to: someone had to draw that (and even more, gather requirements to draw that, rather than it just being one keyframe following the same rules of thousands of others.) It cost a few dollars for that person to get that image; and therefore, it's less likely (though not impossible) that ten users with ten different such illustrations in a forum thread were all secretly the same person/bot. There hasn't even been an AI that can do face-detection on funny-animal cartoons until now, AFAIK, so there was until now no way to even automate+scale scraping of "authentic" profile-pictures from some art-hosting website, let alone a way to automate+scale generating them. But now the cat's out of the bag. Bit of a shame.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Izkata 6y ago
    > so there was until now no way to even automate+scale scraping of "authentic" profile-pictures from some art-hosting website There's a few furry-oriented art websites, so this part has actually been really easy for like two decades.
indrora 6y ago
> did you really have to? All is fair in war, love, and the name of science (with exceptions). After spending a lot of time online as well, I've found just as many folks using content they stole that weren't real people, but were generative content.
- nrr 6y ago
  Stolen content in the furry subculture is actually easily enough dealt with. Given a little bit of work, you can sniff out who drew the original work and piece things together. (This goes notwithstanding that artists actually enjoy knowing when their work is misused so that they can take the appropriate steps to report it, so there's an incentive at play to track this kind of thing down.) Also, because the corpus of source material is comparatively pretty small, you can use image hashing and a distance metric to match something you see to its source. It takes more effort to draw something than it does to snap a photo, and the entirety of E621 can fit on a single SSD. This is quite unlike headshot photographs of people. Authenticating the photographer is almost impossible, and because of the low-effort nature of photos, it's infeasible to have a control data set to match with observed data.
tomphoolery 6y ago
I mean you could just draw a furry avatar before, it's not that different.
- some_furry 6y ago
  You could "just" draw a furry avatar if you have the art skills. Or you could pay an artist to do that for you. Neither tactic really scales, especially when your game is coordinated inauthentic behavior i.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-1RhQ1uuQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-1RhQ1uuQ4 and you need thousands of convincing fake accounts.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    Evidence suggests that the Russians were dropping $400k a month on trolls. That's a lot of commissions on Fiverr or FurAffinity, and still plenty left over to pay east european IT contractor rates. Or hell, just steal enough existing avatars and assume that 80% will get taken down fast.
gwern 6y ago
Furry art could be copied en masse if anyone had ever wanted to use them for trolls. It's no more difficult than, say, anime avatars. If Russian troll farms haven't been using furry avatars, that probably has more to do with the stigma against furries impeding their propaganda mission than about the difficulty of downloading images from e621.
- nrr 6y ago
  Doing this is generally not advisable; you'll be found out pretty quickly if you do. Furries are a pretty tightly-knit bunch of people, and the folks who occupy the artwork-having set are usually two or three degrees of separation from each other. As an added bonus, in case the social network effects weren't enough, DMCA claims become easier because the provenance of a piece of art is often quite clear, what with the subculture's emphasis on always attributing the source of the art in question.
  - makomk 6y ago
    Russian propaganda agents actually infiltrated furry Tumblr pretty well; it seems to have been one of their more successful operations in terms of reaching a wide audience. It just didn't get so much media coverage, probably because (as you'd expect for an operation targeting Tumblr and furries) the political messages they used to weren't ones that fit the existing narrative about Russian interference.
    - nrr 6y ago
      Interesting. Would you happen to have any good sources for that? All I'm coming up with are pop culture rags that are scant on the details and don't offer up any real analysis of what went on there.
      - anchpop 6y ago
        I found this [0], which is pretty scant on details. It is also scant on details but amusingly it lists the usernames they used. A few seemed somewhat political or related to race issues, including: 1) voteforwest2020 2) weproudto2black 3) aaddictedtoblackk 4) best-usa-today 5) black-to-the-bones 6) blackness-by-your-side 7) blacknproud 8) blacktolive 9) bleepthepolice 10) guns4l1fe 11) sumchckn previously known as: blondeinpolitics, blvckcommunity, classylgbthomie, hwuudoin, politixblondie 12) superblygun [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/23/tumblr-confirms-84-accounts-linked-to-kremlin-trolls/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/23/tumblr-confirms-84-account...
andrepd 6y ago
>Oddly enough, furries were the last bastion of humanity. What do you mean by this?
- some_furry 6y ago
  Quoth Pinboard: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/992819169593716737 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/992819169593716737 > (for people not familiar, furries are a vibrant online community and one of the last outposts of collaborative, creative Internet culture. They're also heavily LGBTQ and have a deep commitment to inclusiveness and social justice. Pretty great people to have on your side!)
- nrr 6y ago
  It's easier to tell whether or not an account is a bot if it uses a furry avatar. There are a couple of important facts to consider: The furry subculture is very tightly knit, and there's a reasonable chance that you're only two or three degrees of separation from someone else. There's also an emphasis on attributing furry artwork back to its source, not to mention tools for doing just this. Those two things make authenticating the identity behind an account with a furry avatar comparatively very easy when contrasted to a human headshot photograph.

by nrr 6y ago

URSpider94 6y ago

What?

some_furry 6y ago
> What? What nrr is saying is simply: If someone replies to a comment and they have a human avatar, there was always a chance it was the output of https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com Their heuristic for "if it's a furry avatar, it's probably not from a Russian troll farm" is now invalid.
- URSpider94 6y ago
  Ok, thank you (and no offense meant to the OP) that makes sense in an odd way, and I’m clearly just not up on these things. I wasn’t aware that the corresponding fake-person generator was a thing, but of course it is. There’s something odd about the fact that a cartoon rendering would be more trustworthy than a photo. Then again, there’s always been the joke about people who keep the sample photo that comes in the picture frame to pretend they have a s.o. or family ...
derefr 6y ago
If you look at the profile pictures on Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, etc., they fall into a few categories: • fallback — e.g. the egg image on twitter • explicitly algorithmic — e.g. http://identicon.net/ http://identicon.net/ • logotypes — actual logos, icons, arbitrary aesthetically-pleasing typographical art • headshots of real people • photographs of real-life things — places, nature, buildings, etc. • crops from TV/film — headshots of actors playing characters, or whatever you'd call Baby Yoda • famous works of art — crops of prints of paintings, crops of photos of sculptures • commercially-marketable art — box art, movie posters, crops from cartoons/anime, professionally-commissioned CG paintings that fit the style of their source material • unknown, non-marketable art — works that are clearly either self-made, or commissioned as a one-off, where the work has traits that make it specific-enough to someone's tastes that it obviously would never have been produced as spec work without an arranged buyer/planned use The parent's point is that, for all the categories except the last, there's an obvious way to scrape or generate a million such images, that someone can include in their spambot/voting-ring registering algorithm. The last category, though—custom competent-but-not-commercial-looking illustrations—were, in some sense, a Proof of Work token for the profile it was attached to: someone had to draw that (and even more, gather requirements to draw that, rather than it just being one keyframe following the same rules of thousands of others.) It cost a few dollars for that person to get that image; and therefore, it's less likely (though not impossible) that ten users with ten different such illustrations in a forum thread were all secretly the same person/bot. There hasn't even been an AI that can do face-detection on funny-animal cartoons until now, AFAIK, so there was until now no way to even automate+scale scraping of "authentic" profile-pictures from some art-hosting website, let alone a way to automate+scale generating them. But now the cat's out of the bag. Bit of a shame.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Izkata 6y ago
  > so there was until now no way to even automate+scale scraping of "authentic" profile-pictures from some art-hosting website There's a few furry-oriented art websites, so this part has actually been really easy for like two decades.

indrora 6y ago

> did you really have to? All is fair in war, love, and the name of science (with exceptions). After spending a lot of time online as well, I've found just as many folks using content they stole that weren't real people, but were generative content.

nrr 6y ago
Stolen content in the furry subculture is actually easily enough dealt with. Given a little bit of work, you can sniff out who drew the original work and piece things together. (This goes notwithstanding that artists actually enjoy knowing when their work is misused so that they can take the appropriate steps to report it, so there's an incentive at play to track this kind of thing down.) Also, because the corpus of source material is comparatively pretty small, you can use image hashing and a distance metric to match something you see to its source. It takes more effort to draw something than it does to snap a photo, and the entirety of E621 can fit on a single SSD. This is quite unlike headshot photographs of people. Authenticating the photographer is almost impossible, and because of the low-effort nature of photos, it's infeasible to have a control data set to match with observed data.

tomphoolery 6y ago

I mean you could just draw a furry avatar before, it's not that different.

some_furry 6y ago
You could "just" draw a furry avatar if you have the art skills. Or you could pay an artist to do that for you. Neither tactic really scales, especially when your game is coordinated inauthentic behavior i.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-1RhQ1uuQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-1RhQ1uuQ4 and you need thousands of convincing fake accounts.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  Evidence suggests that the Russians were dropping $400k a month on trolls. That's a lot of commissions on Fiverr or FurAffinity, and still plenty left over to pay east european IT contractor rates. Or hell, just steal enough existing avatars and assume that 80% will get taken down fast.

gwern 6y ago

Furry art could be copied en masse if anyone had ever wanted to use them for trolls. It's no more difficult than, say, anime avatars. If Russian troll farms haven't been using furry avatars, that probably has more to do with the stigma against furries impeding their propaganda mission than about the difficulty of downloading images from e621.

nrr 6y ago
Doing this is generally not advisable; you'll be found out pretty quickly if you do. Furries are a pretty tightly-knit bunch of people, and the folks who occupy the artwork-having set are usually two or three degrees of separation from each other. As an added bonus, in case the social network effects weren't enough, DMCA claims become easier because the provenance of a piece of art is often quite clear, what with the subculture's emphasis on always attributing the source of the art in question.
- makomk 6y ago
  Russian propaganda agents actually infiltrated furry Tumblr pretty well; it seems to have been one of their more successful operations in terms of reaching a wide audience. It just didn't get so much media coverage, probably because (as you'd expect for an operation targeting Tumblr and furries) the political messages they used to weren't ones that fit the existing narrative about Russian interference.
  - nrr 6y ago
    Interesting. Would you happen to have any good sources for that? All I'm coming up with are pop culture rags that are scant on the details and don't offer up any real analysis of what went on there.
    - anchpop 6y ago
      I found this [0], which is pretty scant on details. It is also scant on details but amusingly it lists the usernames they used. A few seemed somewhat political or related to race issues, including: 1) voteforwest2020 2) weproudto2black 3) aaddictedtoblackk 4) best-usa-today 5) black-to-the-bones 6) blackness-by-your-side 7) blacknproud 8) blacktolive 9) bleepthepolice 10) guns4l1fe 11) sumchckn previously known as: blondeinpolitics, blvckcommunity, classylgbthomie, hwuudoin, politixblondie 12) superblygun [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/23/tumblr-confirms-84-accounts-linked-to-kremlin-trolls/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/23/tumblr-confirms-84-account...

andrepd 6y ago

>Oddly enough, furries were the last bastion of humanity. What do you mean by this?

some_furry 6y ago
Quoth Pinboard: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/992819169593716737 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/992819169593716737 > (for people not familiar, furries are a vibrant online community and one of the last outposts of collaborative, creative Internet culture. They're also heavily LGBTQ and have a deep commitment to inclusiveness and social justice. Pretty great people to have on your side!)
nrr 6y ago
It's easier to tell whether or not an account is a bot if it uses a furry avatar. There are a couple of important facts to consider: The furry subculture is very tightly knit, and there's a reasonable chance that you're only two or three degrees of separation from someone else. There's also an emphasis on attributing furry artwork back to its source, not to mention tools for doing just this. Those two things make authenticating the identity behind an account with a furry avatar comparatively very easy when contrasted to a human headshot photograph.