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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.
Look, I'm on board with a good nazi bash just like everyone else...but...
This smells fishy. They openly admit they spammed people, and they don't provide context to the discussion. Twitter is known for having a somewhat left-bias, so if these folks were identified and banned, twice, I'm already suspicious.
The linked article stinks of sensationalism, and that's what tripped my bullshit sensors from the start.
These assholes may be telling the truth, and they may be entirely justified in their outrage, but the article and the style in which it was written makes me highly suspicious.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
If you eliminate the troll accounts, you would find twitter is not experiencing the growth it claims.
It sounds a lot like they took a self-selected list of target accounts that they selected (or. People they personally chose to try and censor) and had a bot continuously spam any place those people tried to speak.
Perhaps it is just me, but doing that seems pretty damn 'nazi' (to use the modern interpretation of the word) and deserves a ban hammer at the least.
What they have done is basically told the world 'or opinion is RIGHT, and we will shout down any other opinions, because only our opinion is allowed to be heard, agree with us or pay the price'
In other words they are closed minded self riteous morons who want the world to be their own personal echo chamber.
It seems however the right thing was, almost surprisingly, done.
Too bad "nazi" now means anyone who is not a leftist. Enjoy your civil war.
We need to brutally murder these nazi cowards so they understand what the fuck their ideology means to honest, hard working citizens of America. Kill em all.
But commie shits are perfectly ok with you, right?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Did you also report that old commie stooge @BernieSanders?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Not to mention that the title is pretty much a lie.
This 'reporter' selected a bunch of target accounts that they wanted to target, and pointed a bot at them than just spam-replied to attack those accounts.
The bot was doing no finding, no uncovering, nothing smart, it was just attempting to censor through spam.
The guy got exactly what he deserved - in fact was treated better than he should be, because their first time around he actually did manage to get his spam-bot reinstated - it was only the second time that it was correctly taken down for good.
He will try and spin victim-politics here, but the fact is that he feels the right to be the sole determiner of who should be removed from a platform he has nothing to do with. It doesnt reall ymatter if his targets are good, bad, or indifferent - he simply does not have that right.
Yeah, Twitter has a bot policy.
https://help.twitter.com/en/ru...
Yeah but Twitter's biggest problem is also how to clamp down on abusive trolls. A former Twitter employee called the platform: "a honeypot for a**holes”, even Twitter's CEO started worrying about the a**hole factor when celebrities got fed up with the trolls and started abandoning Twitter. It seems to me this bot might be the answer to Twitter's problems rather than one of their problems even if they only used it to monitor the abusers more effectively. They should be sending these people joboffers instead of ban notices.
"You looked at me in a way that I didn't like - you're a nazi fascist sexist misogynist and you need to die."
Any and all reasons for calling someone a "nazi" are fair game. So much so that the word has now lost almost all meaning.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
People really seem to struggle with this as a distinction, don't they. (Also the distinction between communist, socialist, left-of-centre, and liberal)
Trump's supporters have broken America into gun nuts who claim to follow Christ while doing the opposite of his teachings, and people who are capable of thought. America may be fu(led.
Too bad "nazi" now means anyone who is not a leftist.
In this context, "nazi" means white nationalists, white supremacists... basically anyone at the "unite the right" rally who chanted nazi slogans. You know, nazis.
Not conservatives. Not libertarians. Just nazis.
Enjoy your civil war.
Racists caused the last one and racists, presumably because most of them don't actually know what a civil war actually is, seem to want one now. I don't know what a "race war" is, but I would prefer not to share a country with people who need one just so they can be proven right.
So if we can just peacefully persuade the racists to shut the fuck up (or if they are serious about white nationalism, fuck off back to Europe) it won't happen.
It's a fairly good shorthand though.
Sure, why not? Redefining words is all the rage these days.
Fuck the longstanding, established definitions; if I need a new and innovative way to call my political opponent a Bad Person, who's Merriam-Webster to tell me what pejoratives I can fling at him? If "Trump is a literal nazi" didn't work in 2016, then maybe "Trump is literal Satan" will work in 2020.
Homophobia and death threats. What makes you any better than them?
Are you talking about absolute idiots or reasonable people? The former says crazy shit all the time no matter which political/religious/shoe size they have and can be ignored.
Reasonable people use nazi as a generic insult too but not for "anyone who is not a leftist", if they do that they are in the absolute idiot category. Strongly authoritarian right have common traits with national socialism but so have leftist authoritarians. That doesn't mean they _are_ national socialists of course.
But now we should study what _you_ wrote: you imply only "leftist" people use the nazi insult. Ludicrous! Either your world-view is skewed so extremely that everyone using the word nazi is per definition leftist (which indicates that you are a right-wing extremist) or that you are an absolute idiot and should be ignored.
So what is it?
--
People not realizing there are many more axes in politics than the simple "left"-"right" one scares me. Democracy requires thinking people understanding politics in order to function properly.
There are liberal left and there are liberal right, there are authoritarian left just as there are authoritarian right, there are religious leftism just as there are religious rightism.
I wouldn't call them Nazis because they aren't a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
So your argument is Since the persons are not formally members of the nazi party, they are not nazis. That is as ridiculous as claiming Since World War II was the last formally declared war, there have been no wars since then.
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
I wouldn't call them Nazis because they aren't a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
If they look like a Nazi, quack like a Nazi, make heavy use of Nazy symbology and espouse the same values, it's reasonablt to call them Nazis.
If you want to engage in a game of mindless semantics where only you control the definitions, feel free, but don't expect anyone else to think you're being sensible.
you seem to think being called out for bad grammar, bad terminology etc. is some how unacceptable
Ah, I see you've entered the "just make shit up" part of the debate. That didn't take you very long I must say.
Where do you think you are? This isn't Twitter
On Twitter, you might have a chance of trying your arguments out with someone who has more than an armchair perspective, you know, someone who actually fought the Nazis.
I see you simply ignored that.
By the way, quoting the names of inapplicable logical fallacies, especially those you don't understand does not make an argument, and it does not make you sound clever.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
America prides itself on being the great melting pot but 40 years of multi-culturalism has revealed that large ethnic immigration, like Europe is experiencing now, harms society.
I've seen studies showing that multiculturalism is indeed the problem, but with a caveat: "multiculturalism" understood as the specific policy the left began defending since a few decades of preserving cultures as they are by creating almost absolute barriers for meaningful cultural exchange, whose most recent example is the whole nonsense about "cultural appropriation". What this multiculturalism does is to create ghettos with invisible walls, and that in turn results in a permanente divide that only grow resentment and tribal identities.
Before those policies were enacted, the US and other countries did pretty well with immigration. Immigrants understood they were moving into another culture that expected them to fit, and tried their best to fit while preserving distinctive elements of their origin cultures, not the whole package. These elements in turn spread a little into the culture they moved in, resulting in a blend that for all practical purposes worked pretty well. It was a conservative mode of thinking that worked, and worked well.
The current model is the opposite of that, and its failures are showing more and more, and in even more dramatic ways.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Many of the "white nationalists" who marched in Charlotte were wearing swastikas, carrying Nazi flags, and shouting anti-Jewish sayings. The other white nationalists there didn't seem to mind the presence of these folks. As a friendly tip: If you are waving a Nazi flag and shouting anti-Jewish sayings while protesting, chances are you're a Nazi. If the people you're protesting with are carrying a Nazi flag and you don't see anything wrong with that, chances are you're a Nazi.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
So all of a sudden it's "acceptable" to be violent towards someone because they have different views than you, but only if it's a certain subset of different views.
Yes, autocratic white supremecists are bad. No, that is not a free pass for committing assault. Grow up.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
You know, it's funny. No one to the left of Orrin Hatch would mistake me for a leftist. This has gotten me into no end of political tangles and dust-ups in the places I go. And yet, I've never been called a Nazi. Not even in jest, except in direct response to me pointing out that nobody ever calls me a Nazi, and I think we can all agree that doesn't count.
How can this be, I wonder? If you and I -rightists both- are so similar, how is it possible that you get called a Nazi all the time, yet I never do, even as a joke? I suspect it comes down to one critical difference between us: you are a Nazi, and I am not. Godwin's Law aside, most people really are savvy enough to tell the difference.
Bullshit. There's a multitude of specific causes for which people can rally while they do not necessarily agree with each other on all other issues. I will rally for free speech in a crowd where there are Nazis, Sharia advocates, Commies and/or whoever else, wearing their respective symbolics, and that doesn't make me one of them. The rhetoric you're using here is often employed in an attempt to smear political opponents with a Nazi label.
If I'm at a free-speech rally and nazi's with flags, and arm-bands show up I wouldn't be rallying with them and I suspect the vast majority of the people wouldn't either and would probably react to them.
I don't have common cause with Nazi's and I wouldn't accept and protest with them for anything. There beliefs are the very definition of evil.