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Ex-NSA Hacker Is Building an AI To Find Hate and Far-Right Symbols on Twitter and Facebook (vice.com)

Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai has interviewed Emily Crose, a former NSA hacker, who has built NEMESIS, an AI-powered program that can help spot symbols that have been co-opted by hate groups to signal to each other in plain sight. Crose, who has also moderated Reddit in the past, thought of building NEMESIS after the Charlottesville, Virginia incident last year. From the report: Crose's motivation is to expose white nationalists who use more or less obscure, mundane, or abstract symbols -- or so-called dog whistles -- in their posts, such as the Black Sun and certain Pepe the frog memes. Crose's goal is not only to expose people who use these symbols online but hopefully also push the social media companies to clamp down on hateful rhetoric online. "The real goal is to educate people," Crose told me in a phone call. "And a secondary goal: I'd really like to get the social media platforms to start thinking how they can enforce some decency on their own platforms, a certain level of decorum." [...]

At a glance, the way NEMESIS works is relatively simple. There's an "inference graph," which is a mathematical representation of trained images, classified as Nazi or white supremacist symbols. This inference graph trains the system with machine learning to identify the symbols in the wild, whether they are in pictures or videos. In a way, NEMESIS is dumb, according to Crose, because there are still humans involved, at least at the beginning. NEMESIS needs a human to curate the pictures of the symbols in the inference graph and make sure they are being used in a white supremacist context. For Crose, that's the key to the whole project -- she absolutely does not want NEMESIS to flag users who post Hindu swastikas, for example -- so NEMESIS needs to understand the context. "It takes thousands and thousands of images to get it to work just right," she said.

6 of 509 comments (clear)

  1. Trans SJW wackjob by Train0987 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    https://www.self.com/story/tra...

    Can't find anything claiming he worked for the NSA, simply Army intelligence (which is anything but intelligent).

  2. The Left can't out-stupid the Right by Shane_Optima · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Indeed. As it happens, I believe that (at least in America) the far right is much, much, much more dangerous than the far left, but that doesn't mean these pathetic hypocritical leftist witch hunts put a smile on my face. I mean, this is so stupid. We KNOW that the American leftists are not sufficiency energized by this tactic, hence why there was dip in the turnout of Ds last year, leading to Hillary's loss. Over a year later, and it's nothing but more self-sabotage, more of the War on Humor, etc.

    And yeah, the hypocrisy does really hurt. It bolsters the right wing media and disillusions the pro-rational, pro-truth left. (That's not even the same as "moderate". I don't believe in moderation for moderation's sake, just sanity for sanity's sake and truth for truth's sake.)

    Show of hands: are there any leftists in the audience who don't know, or still refuse to admit, that Black Lives Matter was/is a centrally planned movement run by a organization that openly quotes and openly idolizes the fugitive "domestic terrorist" and cop killer, Assata Shakur? Because it was, and they do. For a very long time, they had an attributed quote from her at the top of their website and you could find dozens of videos of BLM protesters chanting that same quote in unison at their rallies and protests. And the other major populist leftist movement of the past few years, that Women's March thing? Also centrally organized, and they openly celebrated Assata Shakur's birthday.

    The people on the left don't know this or want to hear any of this; they don't want think about it. But guess what? The right wing knows about it and they are using it (plus the War on Humor, plus a few of the actual lies printed by the "MSM", plus a thousand other groanworthy missteps by leftists who foolishly think they can beat the far right at its own game) to win over the hearts and minds of a new generation.

    I have zero fear of the "far left" directly doing massive damage to America; our left-wing politicians are way too moderate-ized (and also too unpopular) for that to ever happen. But these jokers are ruining it for everyone else, all the millions of us who despite what the Republicans stand for right now. They're ruining it for everyone, because they actually think that they can out-stupid and out-demagogue the right wing in America. And you can't; you just CAN'T god damn it.

    A left wing pro-PC / witch hunt mentality led directly to Trump and six months before that, it led directly to Brexit. How many clusterfucks is it going to take for people to wake up and realize that this has been a FAILED strategy and move on?

  3. Re:Odd by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Because it's Salami Tactics by the Far Left.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    The term Salami tactics (Hungarian: szalámitaktika) was coined in the late 1940s by the orthodox communist leader Mátyás Rákosi to describe the actions of the Hungarian Communist Party. Rákosi claimed he destroyed the non-Communist parties by "cutting them off like slices of salami." By portraying his opponents as fascists (or at the very least fascist sympathizers), he was able to get the opposition to slice off its right wing, then its centrists, then the more courageous left wingers, until only those fellow travelers willing to collaborate with the Communists remained in power.

    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  4. Re:Awesome by Hal_Porter · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When gay people said they didn't want to get attacked for being gay I supported them.

    When gay people wanted to get married I supported that.

    But now gay people want to force bakers to bake them cakes and trans people want to punish people for 'misgendering' or 'deadnaming' them you know what? They can fuck right off. It's not longer about gaining rights for themselves, it's about taking rights away from other people.

    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  5. Re: Awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Calling a 6ft tall, 280lb angry clearly male biker a woman and getting the shit beat out of you isn't the same as calling someone sir that looks male, acts male, is trying their hardest to be as socially defined as male as possible, but is actually a man pretending to be a woman pretending to me a man that gets offended if you use the wrong gender they felt like being at that moment.

  6. No, it's a blatant re-branding. by skam240 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    No, conservatives have seen fit to re-brand feminism by pointing to its extreme elements. Is a small government type an anarchist? No but an anarchist would advocate for smaller government. Is someone concerned about illegal immigration a racist? No but a racist certainly would be. Likewise a feminist is not a man hater just because they advocate for treating women equally.

    It makes me crazy to hear female conservative commentators make statements like "I'm not a feminist but..." and then state they're in favor of equality of the sexes or in other words, lay out a completely main stream feminist agenda. They're literally participating in the negative re-branding of feminism while saying they're all for it.

    --
    I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.