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Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter

nytimes.com

31–40 of 52 posts

Re: Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter

#31
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

Re: Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter

#33
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter

#35

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.

Re: Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter

#36
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.

Re: Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter

#38
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your sympathies are very telling.

Re: Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter

#39

>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 disi…

> 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.

Re: Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter

#40

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.

You have to be the actual copyright holder to do it.

But in all seriousness, the whole Twitter thing is embarrassing. People waste their lives arguing and creating bots, entertaining trolls etc. Quit your Twitter bullshit America, it's embarrassing as Trump is.

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