Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter | Hacker News Reader

Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter

nytimes.com

88 pointstysone43 comments

This is now an internet classic.

Here's an article from 2014 where critics of Vietnam's government were hit with "report abuse" spam to silence them. https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/2/6083647/facebook-s-report-...

Or perhaps you've heard of "Youtube Heroes"? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/09/2...

All you need is an appropriate mob to target politics it doesn't like to shut it down with these automated social media systems. And it can always be abused by your enemies.

“A large number of people have blocked you in response to high volumes of untargeted, unsolicited, or duplicative content or engagements from your account,” we were informed. This was true; Impostor Buster had been blocked by many neo-Nazis. “A large number of spam complaints have been filed against you.” Yes, by neo-Nazis. “You send large numbers of unsolicited replies or mentions.” Yes, to neo-Nazis.

What are the accuracy metrics of the bot? Is he really sure that the bot is only sending stuff to neo-Nazis? Are you allowed to spam someone because they hold a morally reprehensible position?

It wasn't simply the morally reprehensible position. It was also the act of impersonation. The bot identified impersonation.

Ok, so does impersonation allow you to be spammed? It seems like impersonation is non-consequential, or at least hard to measure. Especially on such an ephemeral platform.

If you are going to dismiss impersonation on such an ephemeral platform, why do you care about spamming?

In most platforms impersonating a living person is against the TOS. If twitter were doing their job, they would ban them.

Your sympathies are very telling.

Are you seriously insinuating this user is a neo-Nazi because he's trying to have a polite conversation about what is and is not ethical? That's shameful.

Of course not. Why would you jump to that conclusion? When you see someone with a "Thin Blue Line" decal on their car, do you assume that he/she is a police officer who murders minorities? No, but you know where their allegiance rests.

As CalChris said:

>If you are going to dismiss impersonation on such an ephemeral platform, why do you care about spamming?

Maybe you didn't read enough of the replies to understand the context. I don't know.

I think it's pretty easy to see that impersonation has negative consequences. How would you feel if someone impersonated you to your employer, family, or friend, and said something disagreeable?

I do agree that "They broke the rules" might not be a good justification for further rule-breaking.

Technically it's not impersonation. The trolls are creating fake personae, but not stealing anyone's identity.

Once you use a real person's picture w/o their consent, I think you're walking a fine line between a fake persona and impersonation.

Is abuse a position?

I'm not sure I understand your question in relation to my statement. I'm trying to imply that these people abuse and harass people because of their morally reprehensible position, and they're identified and targeted by the "bot" or other people and labelled by their position, not because they're abusers. Even if they didn't abuse or harass they would still be condemned for their position, or maybe they wouldn't be. I tend to lean on the former.

The people who the bot targeted were impersonating Jews and spreading anti Semitic. That’s not a position, that’s abuse. Is the relevance clear now?

"The con goes like this: The impersonator lifts an online photo of a Jew, Muslim, African-American or other minority — typically one with clear identifying markers, like a yarmulke-clad Hasid or a woman in hijab. Using that picture as a Twitter avatar, the bigot then adds ethnic and progressive descriptors to the bio: “Jewish,” “Zionist,” “Muslim,” “enemy of the alt-right.”

"False identity forged, the trolls then insert themselves into conversations with high-profile Twitter users — conversations that are often seen by tens of thousands of followers — and proceed to say horrifically racist things...

"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."

While I see your point about accuracy and don't necessarily buy the "carefully curated" part, I wouldn't describe the described behavior as "spam" either.

I agree. But twitter seemingly categorized it as such, maybe not spam to a singular user(s). But spam in the sense that it's volume was overwhelming? Maybe there is that many neo-nazis? I'm just not buying into the same things you are.

Couldn't the bot just report the imposter accounts instead of engage them? Pretty sure it's against TOS to impersonate someone without declaring it a parody account.

The problem is that the bot has only a single voice against a whole community.

Twitter trusts the numbers, in a sense, it is very democratic. Trolls are simply very good at strategic voting.

>I’d received the second-most abuse of any Jewish journalist on Twitter during the campaign cycle. [...] As a result, I’ve become something of an unintentional expert on alt-right trolls and their tactics.

Red flag: Blind man about to describe elephant.

Not to be hasty, I didn't stop reading there.

I stopped reading once I found out the author thinks he's moving the needle by ineptly fighting a blatantly-obvious disinformation campaign. On Twitter.

> I’d received the second-most abuse of any Jewish journalist on Twitter during the campaign cycle. [...] As a result, I’ve become something of an unintentional expert on alt-right trolls and their tactics.

> Red flag: Blind man about to describe elephant.

Must one be an alt-right troll to describe one? But not to be hasty I'll skip that point for now...

> I stopped reading once I found out the author thinks he's moving the needle by ineptly fighting a blatantly-obvious disinformation campaign. On Twitter.

... how is this blatantly obvious to the average user? It's simply not.

The article describes duplicating a Twitter account by picture, name, and bio. Pic, bio and subject matter is about as deep as most people would go to identify a Twitter account as belonging to a given person.

I wager that even a large portion of the busy people on this site wouldn't do any further due diligence to determine whether or not the targeted Twitter account was fake, or real, and thus would have horrible opinions of the author of this article.

>Must one be an alt-right troll to describe one?

No, but this smells like the journos that in 2016, lurked /pol/ for a few hours and tried to work backwards to form a grand unified theory of Trump's win. Granted, that's more time than I've spent on /pol/, but it strikes me as what Matt Taibbi once called (paraphrasing) the lazy-sportswriter approach to political reporting.

>how is this blatantly obvious to the average user? It's simply not

It's obvious by the standards of internet propaganda campaigns. I'll admit that's not something typical users are even on guard against...

>Pic, bio and subject matter is about as deep as most people would go to identify a Twitter account as belonging to a given person.

Yeah, but the amount of stock people already put into Twitter users has never made any sense, either. I know there is a hypothetical ideal where a Twitter user you don't already know personally can be seen as less suspicious than "random Internet person," but that's not the world we live in. Even verified twitter users doesn't verify anything more than precisely which moron a set of brain-droppings came from. That doesn't make them right, or even make Twitter a useful way to take the temperature of society.

Twitter perpetrates the lie that the platform can be modified to deliver the platform it can never realistically be. Both in the practices of the business named Twitter, and the actions of mass of users that have some of their professional value and/or fame tied to the idea of Twitter managing to find the mythical usefulness and trustworthiness among strangers long assumed to be impossible in large scale (online or IRL).

This is all a meandering tangent about Twitter's place in society, but informs my previous statements about this article.

Should Twitter also freeze Trump parody accounts?

Maybe saying parody on the profile makes it OK. Those anti-Semitic impostor accounts are probably still effective under that rule, since most people will not check a users profile.

Parody accounts are generally satirical, often humorous, and fairly open about their deception.

Pretending to be jewish, to say unpleasant things and trick unsuspecting people into believing this is the view of a 'Jewish person' (quotes because the whole concept is very reductive at both ends of the interaction) is neither.

I would also say the issue almost certainly isn't limited to Jew-impersonators either, but since that's what the article is about I used that example.

Compare & contrast to "fellow white people".

This seems like a legitimate use case for the DMCA. Why not just use the bot to issue DMCA notices? These accounts are clearly violating copyright.

Alternatively, Grass Roots the posting. Twitter's problem is that the bot is posting, so set up a third party site that identifies tweets and ask legitimate users to respond to them.

So it's okay to spam people if you don't like what they do?

If what they do is actively and solely intendedto be hostile to you (without provocation), yes.

Mods, can you look into why this and the Obama articles were flagged?

A bunch of users flagged it and a bunch of other users vouched for it. These were legit users so I assume it is a legit difference of opinion about whether the articles belong on HN.

In case anyone is wondering, moderators didn't penalize either of the articles. We did ban the garden-variety trolls that showed up in this thread.

Why was this article flagged?

HN has a surprisingly strong alt-right contingent, they’re just more subtle about it than Reddit.

"Alt-right" is a surprisingly polite term for "Nazi sympathizer"

I’m using it mostly as a catch all from “actually a fucking Nazi” all the way to “trolling 4chan type college kid”

But yeah, I know exactly what you mean.

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