Recently on reddit I encountered an anti-semite anarchist*, who complained that in their country (they didn't say specifically but I assume they meant Germany) expressing their anti-semetic views was punishable by jail time.
Now, with this "echoes" thing also being a thing about evading detection, I am led to notice, uh, I guess racists(in the strong sense of the term, not just the weaker "has racial biases, but not necessarily believing any racist statements" sense) having an interest in communicating with each-other in ways that are less detectable.
I think privacy and ability to communicate privately and such are very important, and I also think that preventing harassment is very important.
As such, I think that it is worth looking for ways that something can further both ideals, (without compromising anything on the privacy / communication front, nor on the anti-harassment front), and which is also easy to use.
One idea that comes to mind, but which I don't know if it furthers the ideal of private communications, is creating noise in the channel of extra parentheses that these people are using.
Like, say, what if so many names were triple parenthesized that it ceased to be a useful signal for these people? Is that practical, or would it not do anything because they would consider who is saying it, and therefore disregard the parentheses?
Another thing is that even if that could be done, they could probably just switch to something else which is almost as effective.
And again, there is the question of whether it is even a good thing to attempt to disrupt these signals?
Perhaps it would better serve the purpose of reducing harassment to detect the signals instead of making them noisy.
[I think I had some sort of point about dog-piling and the term "dog-piling" here, but I couldn't remember what my point was from the start of what I wrote, so I removed it.]
Excellent point that this is a tool that allows anti-semites to communicate in a less publicly visible manner.
The database they are using is gated so the best an actor could hope for is to flood the submissions to make updates more costly. Of course such an action would only strengthen the resolve of these groups.
In terms of mining the signal, one could try to look for correlations between people being added to the list and comments made against those people. The idea is that people using this plugin will have their behaviors influenced in a detectable manner. Effectively scrape the comments sections of new sites and fish out those using the tool.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 28.0 ms ] threadImagine if Trump got Judge (((Lipset))) and didn't have the Coincidence Detector installed, he might not have realized the truth until it's too late!
They should have just called it Dog Whistle -- We tell you what to think so you don't have to.
Recently on reddit I encountered an anti-semite anarchist*, who complained that in their country (they didn't say specifically but I assume they meant Germany) expressing their anti-semetic views was punishable by jail time.
Now, with this "echoes" thing also being a thing about evading detection, I am led to notice, uh, I guess racists(in the strong sense of the term, not just the weaker "has racial biases, but not necessarily believing any racist statements" sense) having an interest in communicating with each-other in ways that are less detectable.
I think privacy and ability to communicate privately and such are very important, and I also think that preventing harassment is very important.
As such, I think that it is worth looking for ways that something can further both ideals, (without compromising anything on the privacy / communication front, nor on the anti-harassment front), and which is also easy to use.
One idea that comes to mind, but which I don't know if it furthers the ideal of private communications, is creating noise in the channel of extra parentheses that these people are using.
Like, say, what if so many names were triple parenthesized that it ceased to be a useful signal for these people? Is that practical, or would it not do anything because they would consider who is saying it, and therefore disregard the parentheses?
Another thing is that even if that could be done, they could probably just switch to something else which is almost as effective.
And again, there is the question of whether it is even a good thing to attempt to disrupt these signals?
Perhaps it would better serve the purpose of reducing harassment to detect the signals instead of making them noisy.
[I think I had some sort of point about dog-piling and the term "dog-piling" here, but I couldn't remember what my point was from the start of what I wrote, so I removed it.]
There are many hard problems here I think.
The database they are using is gated so the best an actor could hope for is to flood the submissions to make updates more costly. Of course such an action would only strengthen the resolve of these groups.
In terms of mining the signal, one could try to look for correlations between people being added to the list and comments made against those people. The idea is that people using this plugin will have their behaviors influenced in a detectable manner. Effectively scrape the comments sections of new sites and fish out those using the tool.