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 theyre impersonating.
This deception is relatively simple, but it is disturbingly effective, Rosenberg wrote. Most casual users arent likely to reverse image-search a trolls avatar to see if it was stolen from someone else or peruse the accounts 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.
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https://www.rawstory.com/2017/12/jewish-journalist-who-sought-to-combat-bigoted-troll-imposters-explains-how-twitter-sided-with-the-nazis/