(((nataluna)))

We Built a Bot That Trolls Twitter's Worst Anti-Semitic Trolls

As the No. 2 most-harassed Jewish journalist on Twitter per the Anti-Defamation League, I've become intimately familiar with the colorful cast of anti-Jewish bigots that populate social media. There are those who will photoshop you into gas chambers and concentration camps. Others like pairing Nazi ...

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But there is one particular type of anti-Semitic troll that I find particularly pernicious: the racists who use their accounts to impersonate Jews and defame them. The con goes like this: The troll finds a picture of a very Jewish-looking person online—typically a Hasidic Jew in full regalia—and makes it his avatar. He puts a bunch of very Jewish descriptors in his bio (“Orthodox,” “Zionist,” “enemy of the alt-right”). He then proceeds to insert himself into conversations with prominent Twitter users—conversations that will often be read by tens of thousands of followers—and say horrifically racist things. Thus, it appears to unsuspecting readers that Jews are outlandishly bigoted. The same has been done with other minorities, from Latinos to African-Americans to Muslims.

The problem is, most casual social media users aren’t even aware that this sort of racist deception is being perpetrated, let alone trained to be vigilant for it. And Twitter isn’t really capable of the detective work to identify these accounts and take them down as they spring up.So the question becomes: How can users fight back? Can this insidious tool of anti-Semitic harassment be defanged like the (((echoes))) that were previously used by internet bigots? The answer is yes, and it takes the form of a Twitter bot.Working with developer Neal Chandra, we created an automated Twitter account that exposes these imposters in real-time. Meet Imposter Buster, social media’s new sheriff. He is programmed with an updated database of impersonator accounts, and every time one of them tweets, he automatically replies and exposes them with pre-programmed evidence:

So, have you encountered a racist troll impersonating a Jew, African-American, Latino, Muslim, or other minority on Twitter? Send it my way at [email protected] and we’ll put the bot on the case. And do be sure to follow Imposter Buster and his exploits on Twitter!