Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Jewish journalist who sought to combat bigoted troll imposters...
...explains how ‘Twitter sided with the Nazis’
27 Dec 2017 at 18:35 ET
Yair Rosenberg, a senior writer for Tablet magazine and one of the most targeted Jewish journalists on Twitter, offered a solution to an endemic bigotry problem on the social network. Twitter thanked him by banning the bot he built to help them better combat bigots.
As Rosenberg described Wednesday in a New York Times op-ed, the problem came in the form of “impersonator trolls” — people who use photos of minorities with identifying characteristics (“like a yarmulke-clad Hasid or a woman in hijab”), attach “ethnic and progressive descriptors” to their bios, and then start responding to major articles with bigoted opinions. Those opinions are then attributed to the minority group they’re impersonating.
“This deception is relatively simple, but it is disturbingly effective,” Rosenberg wrote. “Most casual users aren’t likely to reverse image-search a troll’s avatar to see if it was stolen from someone else or peruse the account’s other tweets and realize that it only shares racist material.”
Because Twitter “lacks the cultural competency to police such impersonators,” the writer decided to “unmask” these trolls.
...
27 Dec 2017 at 18:35 ET
Yair Rosenberg, a senior writer for Tablet magazine and one of the most targeted Jewish journalists on Twitter, offered a solution to an endemic bigotry problem on the social network. Twitter thanked him by banning the bot he built to help them better combat bigots.
As Rosenberg described Wednesday in a New York Times op-ed, the problem came in the form of “impersonator trolls” — people who use photos of minorities with identifying characteristics (“like a yarmulke-clad Hasid or a woman in hijab”), attach “ethnic and progressive descriptors” to their bios, and then start responding to major articles with bigoted opinions. Those opinions are then attributed to the minority group they’re impersonating.
“This deception is relatively simple, but it is disturbingly effective,” Rosenberg wrote. “Most casual users aren’t likely to reverse image-search a troll’s avatar to see if it was stolen from someone else or peruse the account’s other tweets and realize that it only shares racist material.”
Because Twitter “lacks the cultural competency to police such impersonators,” the writer decided to “unmask” these trolls.
...
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/12/jewish-journalist-who-sought-to-combat-bigoted-troll-imposters-explains-how-twitter-sided-with-the-nazis/
