5 ms·

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 occup

by 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...
    - nrr 6y ago
      Yeah, I stumbled upon that as well, but it just looked like the connections to furry merely involved political issues that coincided with the causes that furries tend to care about. Even furries, still being human at the end of the day, contribute to the mainstream political discourse. My definition of "infiltrating furry Tumblr" is perhaps a fair bit stricter: Infiltration implies being accepted as a member of the community, which also implies some level of gossip around someone new or cool whom folks are excited to introduce or meet. The problem is that Tumblr killed these accounts, so there isn't any good record today of what their profiles looked like, what avatars they had, etc. I also can't seem to find anything particularly furry-centric beyond the fact that a malicious actor saw fit to target a subculture for some political trolling. I'm chalking this up to the interface of a subculture with mainstream society being compromised and not necessarily the subculture itself.
gwern 6y ago
Er, that's irrelevant. Obviously people with avatars of dragons and wolves are not actually dragons and wolves, nor are they generally claiming to be the original artist, any more than the millions of people with anime avatars are usually claiming to actually be Japanese schoolgirls or the mangaka who drew the avatar. There's nothing to 'find out' in either case.
- nrr 6y ago
  I don't feel it's irrelevant. The fact is that the characters depicted in the artwork you're proposing could be ripped off belong to individuals. People like you and me. People with whom I'm personally good friends, with whom I have shared beers with at conferences, and whom I have visited en route on my trips to far-flung places. These are characters that are recognizable as being digital representations of those individuals. They aren't the trademarks or personality rights of some faceless commercial entity. My point is that trying to use artwork depicting a non-commercial character that isn't yours—that doesn't accurately reflect the representation of your digital self but instead someone else's—is as taboo as impersonation. It isn't tolerated, and that kind of behavior is ripe for gossip. So, yes, while there's a wealth of source material that's ripe for cropping into a profile picture, there's the added hurdle of overcoming the bullshit detectors of furries who will test you to see if you're actually their friend or not.
  - gwern 6y ago
    You're changing arguments in mid-stream. What does any of that have to do with making Twitter more vulnerable to mass-influence operations? No one, Russian trolls least of all, is trying to pretend to be your specific friend (and if someone were doing such a spearphishing attack on you personally, they wouldn't be using new artwork of any kind whatsoever, human or AI-generated, in the first place, as that would defeat the point of trying to pretend to be an existing acquaintance!).
    - nrr 6y ago
      No, I'm making the same argument. I'll restate my proposition: Furry, as a subculture, is mostly secure against the kinds of deception employed by, e.g., Russian trolls because of social network effects. There are a few facts I feel are worth emphasizing here. Sorry, it's a lot of words, but I want to make sure the required context is here for drawing the logical connectives that are missing. Notably, furries tend to be acquainted with each other, in the sense that if two people within the community don't personally know each other, the chance is very good that they at least know of each other or have mutual friends who can make introductions. For individuals who exhibit problematic behaviors, interventions happen, and they happen reasonably swiftly. This goes hand-in-hand with the fact that there are artifacts that act as shibboleths within the community and help to signal "hey, you're one of us." The subculture has a very well-defined market, literally and proverbially, for these kinds of artifacts, and the market is amazingly insular with known players who are also themselves part of the community. One common example is the artwork I've been talking about, given its relevance here, but I've left a thing or two unstated in my conversation about it so far. There's a reverence of sorts for the artists who do this work, and I'd feel safe in asserting without evidence that artists don't tend to become popular or get work at all unless they've had a good inculcation of what furry as a subculture is all about, up to and including the social connections. Ultimately—and forgive the hand waving—this means that the artwork is readily identifiable as "furry" (as opposed to "just a cartoon") and that there's an understanding as to where it came from. It's able to be authenticated as having originated from within the furry subculture. The implication that there's widespread interest to know the identity of the individual who did a piece of artwork is hopefully clear. ("Ooh, are they open for commissions?" is a common refrain.) That said, these artifacts extend far beyond just raster images on the Internet. There are T-shirts, stickers, enamel pins, and what seems like myriad other things that are innocuous (or just plain weird, let's admit) to folks outside the community but will start a conversation between folks within. As an anecdote: A homemade sticker on my ThinkPad given to me by an artist friend was seen by a passenger sitting next to me on a flight, and it wound up leading to us talking for the whole flight and getting margaritas while on layover to our separate final destinations. I still talk to that individual today, and knowing them has actually strengthened my connections to other folks. Those artifacts wind up being a very good way of establishing common ground with someone else within the community very quickly, further cementing the "hey, you're one of us" effect. … phew. Let's recap. The furry subculture is particularly tight-knit and egalitarian with strong social connections and community cohesion that are reinforced by cultural artifacts and shared experiences that come with the ability to be verified as genuine. Or to repeat something I said earlier: "[Copying furry artwork en masse] is generally not advisable; you'll be found out pretty quickly if you do," given a definition of copying probably being closer to co-opting.

by nrr 6y ago

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...
  - nrr 6y ago
    Yeah, I stumbled upon that as well, but it just looked like the connections to furry merely involved political issues that coincided with the causes that furries tend to care about. Even furries, still being human at the end of the day, contribute to the mainstream political discourse. My definition of "infiltrating furry Tumblr" is perhaps a fair bit stricter: Infiltration implies being accepted as a member of the community, which also implies some level of gossip around someone new or cool whom folks are excited to introduce or meet. The problem is that Tumblr killed these accounts, so there isn't any good record today of what their profiles looked like, what avatars they had, etc. I also can't seem to find anything particularly furry-centric beyond the fact that a malicious actor saw fit to target a subculture for some political trolling. I'm chalking this up to the interface of a subculture with mainstream society being compromised and not necessarily the subculture itself.

gwern 6y ago

Er, that's irrelevant. Obviously people with avatars of dragons and wolves are not actually dragons and wolves, nor are they generally claiming to be the original artist, any more than the millions of people with anime avatars are usually claiming to actually be Japanese schoolgirls or the mangaka who drew the avatar. There's nothing to 'find out' in either case.

nrr 6y ago
I don't feel it's irrelevant. The fact is that the characters depicted in the artwork you're proposing could be ripped off belong to individuals. People like you and me. People with whom I'm personally good friends, with whom I have shared beers with at conferences, and whom I have visited en route on my trips to far-flung places. These are characters that are recognizable as being digital representations of those individuals. They aren't the trademarks or personality rights of some faceless commercial entity. My point is that trying to use artwork depicting a non-commercial character that isn't yours—that doesn't accurately reflect the representation of your digital self but instead someone else's—is as taboo as impersonation. It isn't tolerated, and that kind of behavior is ripe for gossip. So, yes, while there's a wealth of source material that's ripe for cropping into a profile picture, there's the added hurdle of overcoming the bullshit detectors of furries who will test you to see if you're actually their friend or not.
- gwern 6y ago
  You're changing arguments in mid-stream. What does any of that have to do with making Twitter more vulnerable to mass-influence operations? No one, Russian trolls least of all, is trying to pretend to be your specific friend (and if someone were doing such a spearphishing attack on you personally, they wouldn't be using new artwork of any kind whatsoever, human or AI-generated, in the first place, as that would defeat the point of trying to pretend to be an existing acquaintance!).
  - nrr 6y ago
    No, I'm making the same argument. I'll restate my proposition: Furry, as a subculture, is mostly secure against the kinds of deception employed by, e.g., Russian trolls because of social network effects. There are a few facts I feel are worth emphasizing here. Sorry, it's a lot of words, but I want to make sure the required context is here for drawing the logical connectives that are missing. Notably, furries tend to be acquainted with each other, in the sense that if two people within the community don't personally know each other, the chance is very good that they at least know of each other or have mutual friends who can make introductions. For individuals who exhibit problematic behaviors, interventions happen, and they happen reasonably swiftly. This goes hand-in-hand with the fact that there are artifacts that act as shibboleths within the community and help to signal "hey, you're one of us." The subculture has a very well-defined market, literally and proverbially, for these kinds of artifacts, and the market is amazingly insular with known players who are also themselves part of the community. One common example is the artwork I've been talking about, given its relevance here, but I've left a thing or two unstated in my conversation about it so far. There's a reverence of sorts for the artists who do this work, and I'd feel safe in asserting without evidence that artists don't tend to become popular or get work at all unless they've had a good inculcation of what furry as a subculture is all about, up to and including the social connections. Ultimately—and forgive the hand waving—this means that the artwork is readily identifiable as "furry" (as opposed to "just a cartoon") and that there's an understanding as to where it came from. It's able to be authenticated as having originated from within the furry subculture. The implication that there's widespread interest to know the identity of the individual who did a piece of artwork is hopefully clear. ("Ooh, are they open for commissions?" is a common refrain.) That said, these artifacts extend far beyond just raster images on the Internet. There are T-shirts, stickers, enamel pins, and what seems like myriad other things that are innocuous (or just plain weird, let's admit) to folks outside the community but will start a conversation between folks within. As an anecdote: A homemade sticker on my ThinkPad given to me by an artist friend was seen by a passenger sitting next to me on a flight, and it wound up leading to us talking for the whole flight and getting margaritas while on layover to our separate final destinations. I still talk to that individual today, and knowing them has actually strengthened my connections to other folks. Those artifacts wind up being a very good way of establishing common ground with someone else within the community very quickly, further cementing the "hey, you're one of us" effect. … phew. Let's recap. The furry subculture is particularly tight-knit and egalitarian with strong social connections and community cohesion that are reinforced by cultural artifacts and shared experiences that come with the ability to be verified as genuine. Or to repeat something I said earlier: "[Copying furry artwork en masse] is generally not advisable; you'll be found out pretty quickly if you do," given a definition of copying probably being closer to co-opting.