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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...
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.
And how would you feel if within seconds of you posting anything (and I DO notice I'm replying to an AC, so I mean the collective 'you' here) a reply would appear essentially yelling, "THIS GUY IS A CONFIRMED NAZI! DON'T ASSOCIATE WITH HIM EVER!"?
Doesn't matter if it's true. There's no way of proving innocence or guilt. There's just this bot hounding you, following you through username and account changes. Isn't that the very DEFINITION of harassment and stalking?
Is it okay to do that because some of the targets, hell even if they have 100% accuracy, agree with Nazi ideology? Do we REALLY need to start saying "First they came for the Nazis, and I said nothing because I wasn't a Nazi ..."?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Homophobia and death threats. What makes you any better than them?
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.
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.