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A Reporter Built a Bot To Find Nazi Sock Puppet Accounts. Twitter Banned the Bot and Kept the Nazis (nytimes.com)
Yair Rosenberg, writing for the New York Times: I asked my own Twitter followers whether it might be possible to create a bot that would reply to these impostors and expose their true nature to any users they tried to fool. Neal Chandra, a talented developer in San Francisco whom I've never met, replied, "I can try to throw something together this evening." And so, after a week of testing, Impostor Buster was born. 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 (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled). Within days, our golem for the digital age had become a runaway success, garnering thousands of followers and numerous press write-ups. Most important, we received countless thank-yous from alerted would-be victims. The impersonator trolls seethed. Some tried changing their user names to evade the bot (it didn't work). Others simply reverted to their openly neo-Nazi personas. A few even tried to impersonate the bot, which was vastly preferable from our perspective and rather amusing. Twitter sided with the Nazis. In April, the service suspended Impostor Buster without explanation and reinstated it only after being contacted by the ADL's cyber-hate team. Over the next few months, we fine-tuned the bot to reduce its tweets and avoid tripping any of Twitter's alarms. As the trolls continued to report the bot to no avail, we thought the problem was resolved. But we were wrong. This month, Twitter suspended the bot again, and this time refused to revive it.
Yeah, Twitter has a bot policy.
https://help.twitter.com/en/ru...
Zoid.com
Nope. 1st amend. applies to govt only.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
"Twitter is known for having a somewhat left-bias"??
The most famous Twitter account in the world belongs to Donald Trump. Is he on the left in the world you live in?
The party was dismantled generations ago, there are no more Nazis.
So those chaps making Nazi saultes, chanting "blood and soil", wearing swastikas and so on---what would you call them exactly?
If you want a good argument about it, I suggest you try arguing with this chap:
https://mobile.twitter.com/Har...
His take on it:
I guess I got confused when they gave the #Hitler salute and chanted "blood and soil" b/c it reminded me of who I fought in my youth.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I don't think that was what they were after, I think they were looking to get banned.
What was curiously absent from the article is any mention of attempts to report the impersonators, twitter has a policy which states that impersonation is not allowed after all.
I'm a Jew, and I meme Hitler shit all the time. Most of my Jewish friends find Nazi and holocaust jokes funny.
Actual Nazis (and Communists like you) engaged in extreme censorship, which is far more evil and offensive than the things you're trying to prevent others from saying. Human expression is a fundamental right, even if you disagree with what is said.
Only white liberals care about this stuff, or people who make a living off of victimhood.
"So those chaps making Nazi saultes, chanting "blood and soil", wearing swastikas and so on---what would you call them exactly?"
They're called Neo-nazi's.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I'm not taking a side, but just pointing out. According to Merriam-Webster... nazi would be a valid term to use in these cases. You picked a poor example.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Nazi
2 b : one who is likened to a German Nazi :
So calling someone a nazi by definition makes them a nazi.
Nice.
The Nazis were left wing as well.
No, they weren't. They defined themselves as a "third position" distinct from both right and left, adopting a few elements from one side, a few from the other, and adding stuff of their own to the mix. This is why the right calls them left, the left calls them right, the center considers them extremists in one direction or the other, and also why all three are wrong. The center is correct only insofar as nazis are extremists, but they're extremists in a direction that doesn't fit within the left-right spectrum.
Also, internally the Nazi Party had several subgroups, including a left wing, a right wing, a monarchist wing etc. At some point the right wing of the party decided the left wing was being too troublesome and killed them all. Afterwards the economic policies of the party, that were somewhat "balanced" from the perspective of the left-right axis of the time, turned markedly to the right. But contrary to what the current left wants to believe on the matter, that still didn't turn Nazism itself into a right wing movement.
Nazism was and remained first and foremost nazi-wing. Any attempt at reducing that wing so as to fit the left-right spectrum, be it into the left side of the spectrum, as conservatives and libertarians want to do, be it into the right side of the spectrum, as liberals and socialists want to do, is and will continue being incorrect and doomed to failure.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Merriam-Webster can suck it. Oxford gets it better.
Nazi
NOUN plural nazis
1) historical A member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
1.1) derogatory A person with extreme racist or authoritarian views.
1.2) A person who seeks to impose their views on others in a very autocratic or inflexible way.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Correct. All racists are not Nazis, but damn near all Nazis are racists.
It's possible to be a racist and not believe in nationalism and autocratic rule.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Semantics wouldn't save me or my family if these people got into power and rounded us up because we're Jewish*. It wouldn't be any comfort to me to say "Sure these people stand for everything the Nazis stood for but since they haven't joined any 'National Socialist German Workers' Party' they aren't technically Nazis." These groups worship Nazis and want to pick up where Hitler left off. I've met one in person and he told me, to my face knowing that I was Jewish, that the only thing Hitler did wrong was not finishing the Jewish people off. These people are Nazis.
* And don't say they wouldn't do that. It might not happen right away, but these people would love to do this if they got enough political power. As for the "it wouldn't happen in America" argument that some trot out, I'd respond with exhibit A: The Japanese Internment Camps during WW2.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.