Inside Google's Internet Justice League and its AI-Powered War on Trolls
AUTHOR: ANDY GREENBERG.
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 09.19.16.
TIME OF PUBLICATION: 6:55 AM.
AROUND MIDNIGHT ONE Saturday in January, Sarah Jeong was on her couch, browsing Twitter, when she spontaneously wrote what she now bitterly refers to as “the tweet that launched a thousand ships.” The 28-year-old journalist and author of The Internet of Garbage, a book on spam and online harassment, had been watching Bernie Sanders boosters attacking feminists and supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement. In what was meant to be a hyperbolic joke, she tweeted out a list of political caricatures, one of which called the typical Sanders fan a “vitriolic cryptoracist who spends 20 hours a day on the Internet yelling at women.”
The ill-advised late-night tweet was, Jeong admits, provocative and absurd—she even supported Sanders. But what happened next was the kind of backlash that’s all too familiar to women, minorities, and anyone who has a strong opinion online. By the time Jeong went to sleep, a swarm of Sanders supporters were calling her a neoliberal shill. By sunrise, a broader, darker wave of abuse had begun. She received nude photos and links to disturbing videos. One troll promised to “rip each one of (her) hairs out” and “twist her tits clear off.”
The attacks continued for weeks. “I was in crisis mode,” she recalls. So she did what many victims of mass harassment do: She gave up and let her abusers have the last word. Jeong made her tweets private, removing herself from the public conversation for a month. And she took a two-week unpaid leave from her job as a contributor to the tech news site Motherboard.
For years now, on Twitter and practically any other freewheeling public forum, the trolls have been out in force. Just in recent months: Trump’s anti-Semitic supporters mobbed Jewish public figures with menacing Holocaust “jokes.” Anonymous racists bullied African American comedian Leslie Jones off Twitter temporarily with pictures of apes and Photoshopped images of semen on her face. Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti quit the service after a horde of misogynist attackers resorted to rape threats against her 5-year-old daughter. “It’s too much,” she signed off. “I can’t live like this.” Feminist writer Sady Doyle says her experience of mass harassment has induced a kind of permanent self-censorship. “There are things I won’t allow myself to talk about,” she says. “Names I won’t allow myself to say.”
https://www.wired.com/2016/09/inside-googles-internet-justice-league-ai-powered-war-trolls/
