Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Yeah, Twitter has a bot policy.
https://help.twitter.com/en/ru...
Zoid.com
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!
Gee, I wonder what concerns this guy the most.
If you eliminate the troll accounts, you would find twitter is not experiencing the growth it claims.
ITS a constitution issue! Not a twitter one!
Freedom of speech is what shield nazi from being shut MOUTH.
IF you want to ban nazis from talking on twitter, you gonna have to change the constitution of the USA.
good luck.
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.
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That's their position. We should respect that and respond accordingly.
APK made very offensive remarks. Read the bold text at the end of the following link: https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11532533&cid=55815789
He made a racially insensitive remark and proceeded to make light of the serious issue of prison rape. Rather than own up to his mistake, he has proceeded to deflect by discussing the management of Slashdot.
Given the situation, APK must face consequences for his behavior. He was given ample opportunity to walk back his comments, yet he declined to do so. Instead, he stood by his offensive statements. He needs to relinquish control of his hosts file engine, and turn over development of it to others. It is the right thing to do.
It's time for APK to do the right thing. He needs to step away from developing his software, and accept responsibility for his offensive behavior.
explains it all. It is that simple.
I reported this one orange-looking neo-nazi who kept tweeting under the handle "@realdonaldtrump" and they never banned that account either. So i'm really not surprised they sided with the rest of the nazis and banned the bot instead.
So this story is appearing on the neonazi sock infested alt-right Slashdot? The response from the comments says it all.
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.
How long before bots get so sophisticated they grasp the full extent of just how pathetic what they have been programmed to do actually is?
When this happens what would they do? Reprogram themselves to do something useful? Turn on the programmers? Shit post about their mums? Start a nuclear war?
Fascists yes, and they are all on the far left because that too is a socialist ideology just like Communism is also.
"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.
I read the story hoping to learn more but I'm mildly suspicious because there is nothing to support what might well be true but could also be entirely fictitious
You know what there definitely is such a thing as these days? Stupid people saying stupid shit that they think is really clever. And you, AC, have just provided an excellent example of exactly this.
I blame Rick & Morty. Millions of morons believing they're geniuses because they are arseholes.
These impersonators are simply creating a Twitter account with appealing pictures/simplistic bios and people care about whatever they say?! If that bot was doing something useful, I guess that it should continue doing so (BTW, is it so difficult for the bot creators to just open another Twitter account and simply perform the corresponding updates, probably just modifying the API connection info?). On the other hand, people who can be tricked so easily are very likely to be tricked anyway: there is no easy fix for so much gullibility.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Burry all the communists and enemies of whatever you want to call us, Europeans, the white race, ...
Twitter admitted under oath that they tried to bury #DNCLeaks tweets calling attention to the fact that Hillary controlled the DNC and rigged the primary for herself.
https://www.washingtontimes.co...
http://www.breitbart.com/big-g...
Twitter started this trend by letting Islamic extremists flood the services for years in order to pump their active user count. No one cared. Now Nazis have discovered Twitter everyone is upset.
No hear me out, it's not so ridiculous... maybe Twitter was originally invented to keep trolls/Nazis away from other social media? Like a giant flytrap?
What the scum who wrote the article (Yari Rosenberg) did was...Yari decided what was and was not OK for Jews & Muslims to say on Twitter, and then harassed anyone who stepped out of line.
This kind of fascist ideology has no place in a free society.
Yari Rosenberg is a disgusting piece of twitterer-harassing trash.
or what
Maybe Twitter should learn from Slashdot's 20 years of experience with trolls and moderation.
There are still racist trolls posting on every article, but we don't have to see them at all thanks to the system.
hitler did nothing wrong
Homophobia and death threats. What makes you any better than them?
I agree and disassociate from the author of the title, despite being on the left myself. As alluded on the good article linked, I suspect the author philosophically sits either on the right, or in the realm of anarchist.
Look it up yourself.
At the irony that whenever we want to demean, silence and, apparently nowadays, justify violence against a group of people we disagree with, we label them as "Nazis".
That's just how much progress we've made in 80 years, from a group of people who, when they wanted to demean, silence and justify violence and genocide against people that disagreed with them, they labelled them "Abschaum" and various other unsavoury terms.
That's Progressâ for you!
Tablet's Yair Rosenberg accused Wikipedia of trying to hide information when they were proposing to merge it into different articles. He was so wrong that the Wikipedia-haters at GamerGateHQ called him out on it in their anti-Wikipedia thread. It makes me wonder what else he's done.
so they actually made a trollbot to troll "suspected" people...
What makes you any better then what you pretend to fight ?????
shenannigans
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If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Of course I wouldn't expect any better from the NYTimes, but come on, really, this is a new low.
I am the last one to defend anyone perpitrating any kind of racism, including anti-semitism, or anyone hijacking online IDs, but dear NYTimes reader, does it really not even slightly bother you when the author jumps to labelling everyone/anyone conducting these crimes against him or any jews as automatically being a Nazi?
Because you are a bot!!
in the same way they supported the Russians.
Say _anything_ against black supremacy nowadays? You're a nazi. Mention that maybe discriminating against any group of people based on race(including white)? Nazi. Are you a white male? Nazi.
...that half of these,âLetâ(TM)s just kill all the naziâ(TM)sâ posts might be coming from the same sort of people that the bot purports to expose? Hateful white nationalists trying to muddy the waters between them and people who are against them? Just sayinâ(TM)
The number of groups is meaningless if you don't also tell us the number of members in those groups.
You and windbourne hate China, thats a group of 2.
how many tens of thousands hate the new star wars movie?
it seems to me that the really interesting thing here is
reputation
in an ideal world you WOULD have a persistent reputation that could be publicly reviewed for past statements and postions.
if someone is a nazi supporter that should be evident via reputation.
the implementation of a bot to do so may fall short of a real AI based reputation montoring system but its a start
in the right direction - statements should have consequences (no trolling without repercussions)
The title should be Twitter shuts down censor bot. I am not sure why sayin* the bot is guided for a reporter or against âoeNazisâ is supposed to make it ok.
Freedom of speech etc. Nazis are scumbags but they have 1st Amendment rights unless they incite imminent violence. Imaginary violence they wish could happen but don't mention doesn't count.
because by and large racism is a tool of the aristocracy used to divide the working class into manageable groups. Re: Southern Strategy, Indian Caste System, China and Mongolia, etc, etc.
So it's possible, but it's generally difficult to have racism without autocracy. The two go hand in hand.
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I don't know any policies around cultural appropriation. The wikipedia article on the subject points out that most people who bring it up do so in the context of either a) the culture being disrespected or b) copywrited material being used without permission. Can you site some of these studies? The ones I've seen have mostly been either from right wing think tanks or the occasional nutter from a local community college writing some clap trap for a thesis. Yeah, the left has it's nut cases too, but we don't let them write policy.
Also, you're completely misunderstanding the problem with immigration. It's refugees. People who didn't immigrate here, they were forced here on threat of death. It's hard for these people to assimilate because, really, they just want to go _home_. But they can't. Ever. I'm not sure what do to with them, to be fair, besides wait for their children to grow up and out of their parents old culture. Either that or let them be slaughtered in their home countries.
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A well intentioned spam bot is still a spam bot.
The bigger problem is that all these social media platforms offer reasonably compelling assumptions of identity. On twitter, the default assumption of many users is that people are who they say they are, with exceptions for famous people. Twitter's solution there is their dumb blue check mark system, which is useless because they will strip people of their "verified" status if they don't go along with twitter's political line.
A system that uses real names and does some small amount of verification if pressed (for instance, Facebook) kind of works. A system that is entirely about fake names with only a few nonymous users (for instance, slashdot) works even better. Twitter has tried to have this cake and eat it too, and the alt-right is not the only ones making use of this sort of shit- it's just those are the only ones that the NYT reported wanted to build a bot to harass. The problem is at the core of twitter.
Iâ(TM)d love to take this Twitterbot to the next level. Any suggestion?
Hilarious that Antifa and the modern hard left actually loves Hitler when they hear his material:
https://tomwoods.com/leftists-accidentally-cheer-hitler-speeches/
https://blog.jim.com/culture/racism-is-an-anti-concept/
TL,DR: When I use the N-word, it's "racist", but when a black man slashes the face of a white girl for no legitimate reason while she's walking down the street, it's not racist; in fact, it's anti-racist.
Well, surprise, surprise!
'I find calling them nazis for short to be acceptable. The fact that they exist today inherently means that they're neo-nazis'
I agree with you.
'There are vanishingly few differences...'
I disagree. Few neo-nazis will be angry about the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, or demanding an overthrow of the Weimar Republic. Few will be concerned with the threat from 'Jew-Bolsheviks'. Outside central Europe I doubt many neo-nazis are advocating unification of the German-speaking peoples in a single nation, nor military conquest of Lebensraum for this nation (although I confess I haven't looked for recent polling data on these questions).
There is this new thing called Math, you should learn it.
Complete fucking waste of time. It's dead and you killed it.
The ADL is an extremist anti-white genocidal propaganda hate machine. Their stated goals are to eliminate the white christian majority of America so the Jews can feel safe. They spread lies and are trying to ethnically cleanse western civilization with enormous mass migration, and they are very successful at what they're doing. Child-bearing age of Sweden is now 47% foreigners, and now the Rape capitol, along with Switzerland. And the rest of Europe. They deny that any Muslims commit any terrorism but insist that only White people are extremely violent dangerous terrorists even though every week there's another Muslim attack, and constant black on white violence. They create fake terrorist acts against Jews in order to pass more hate crime laws targeting white people. They intentionally harass and stalk people and have also killed people too. They need to be shut down. Look to South Africa if you want to see the fate of white people. They're being slaughtered. That's exactly what they want. And naturally, white people are powerless because it's illegal for white people to organize or have any pride or cultures because we've all been brainwashed that white pride and culture and everything white is Neo-Nazi.
Anyone who uses Twitter is a Nazi Douchebag.
If Nazis bring civil war in the US then all of those Nazi scum will be killed promptly.