Essay:Reflections on reporting Twitter Nazis

First, Twitter is a corporation with a bureaucracy. As a corporation, it does not give a fuck unless it changes the bottom line.

From a corporate perspective, Twitter dislikes people who report Nazis much more than they hate Nazis because the former attempt to remove accounts and the latter can attract followers. In the Twitterverse, accounts + followers = ad revenue, and if no one reports someone as a Nazi, Twitter can claim that the person is not actually a Nazi.

CEOs generally do not have any special talent (Why else would they be routinely rewarded for failure?) — and do not give a fuck unless it changes the bottom line. In the case of Jack, he's too busy touting his latest broscience to care. He does however care about PR because PR can affect the bottom line:

“”We're committing Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.

—Jack Dorsey

Nazis are a known problem, but Dorsey has blamed the victims (non-Nazi Twitter users) for not reporting Nazis:

“”A lot of the calls for “remove the Nazis” are also due to the fact our enforcement operates on reporting. A lot of people don’t report. They see things, but it’s easier to tweet out “get rid of the Nazis” than to report it.

Despite the topic of Twitter Nazis being one that he should have been prepared for, that he did in fact think he was prepared for, he actually was factually wrong in the most painfully obvious way about Twitter Nazis — that they exist:

Dorsey: "It actually is. If they align themselves with a violent extremist group, like the American Nazi Party, we suspend their account. There are not self-professed Nazis. If you can show them, I would love to see them, and figure out why we haven't taken action on them, but…"
Brian Hiatt: I can confirm that there are Nazis on Twitter.

Evidentially it would seem that Dorsey still does not give a fuck.

The problem is really not that hard to fix — at least conceptually — but not the way that they're doing it now. The problem with the current method is that it relies entirely on the free labor of non-Nazi victims. It's a burden — no one really wants to do this shit for free: reading putrid, hateful diatribes and looking at stupid memes from people who can barely write or draw. The solutions are fourfold:

1. Summarily remove the worst Nazis (David Duke, Henry Makow, and other shit magnets). Dorsey is highly unlikely to ever punish Trump, so Fugget About It. Dorsey notoriously could not commit on doing anything other than talking about it if Trump made an explicit called for murder.
2. Implement a automated flagging on terms that are very unlikely to be used by non-Nazis except in an explicative manner (e.g., Nazbol, Globohomo, Holohoax, remove kebab, etc.): block the tweet until it is reviewed. Prevent out-linking to known Nazi sites like Daily Stormer or Nazi-saturated sites like Gab and BitChute. This runs counter to Twitter philosophy, but so did banning Nazis before 2018.
3. Train the Trust & Safety team better. They do not understand what they're reviewing mostly — the Nazis have been working on this for a while, so they know how to encode their language so as to evade untrained normies. They should read and maintain something akin to the alt-right glossary, and receive training from various anti-bigotry groups on a regular basis (because of staff turnover).
4. Take the burden off the free labor pool. People who post Nazi shit are not impressed by short blocks — getting short blocks is a badge of honor for some of them. The the Trust & Safety team needs to get rid of the Nazis faster.

Policy

A dozen years after the first tweet, in 2018, Twitter realized that hosting Nazis without having any way to raus them was getting to be bad for the bottom line, and so they developed a policy. It's worthwhile familiarizing oneself with the policy such as it is, but also bear in mind that there is most certainly an internal policy that differs from the external policy. For example, raging antisemites David Duke and Henry Makow have been posting their bile from 2009 through 2020, and 2012 through 2020, respectively. Apparently, having 10,000+ followers means that one can get away with saying shit that Joe Schmoe can't.

Tactics

It might be good idea to create a separate (possibly private or locked) Twitter account that is solely for reporting Nazis. This will make it difficult for Nazis trying to harass you for reporting them. You may never see Nazis on Twitter, because like most social media, Twitter tends toward being a group of echo chambers. The alt-right has a large presence on Twitter, however.

Methods of getting Nazis banhammered:

• Search alt-right code words that are inherently offensive or violent using the alt-right glossary as reference.
• Scroll through timelines of Twitter accounts that appear particularly vile. Pepe the Frog, Groyper, NPC, Noticer memes, and all their variants are likely candidates.
• Twitter accounts that have a high level of Nazi bile are likely to follow and have followers who are also posting bile, so another tactic is to comb through their followers or those that they follow.
• Sometimes a Nazi will lock their account from view after being temporarily suspended, assuming that it will prevent further reports of Twitter violations. At that point, one can still report their Twitter feed for violations without seeing the contents if there is good reason to believe the Nazi is a repeat offender. One can also report the Nazi's profile for hateful or violent images or text.
• With surprising regularity, Nazis will post an image of the tweet that previously got them temporarily suspended. This is a primo tweet for reporting, since it will likely get their account permabanned.
• For re-reporting Nazis, a shortcut for finding more bigoted tweets is to do a search on their account for mentions of whichever group they're likely to be bigoted against (e.g., "Jew (from:NaziPunk)").
• Twitter does not seem to care if one's username is bigoted (e.g., "Holohoax Memorials" has existed since 2011).
• Some Nazis pretend to be 'parody' accounts to pass off their bigotry as 'jokes'. This doesn't usually work so well for them, e.g. the homophobic Chick-fil-A parody account got repeatedly permabanned and the person behind it kept coming back with different but similar accounts until he got tired).
• Another tactic of Nazis is to pretend their account is actually that of a targeted minority (e.g., 'Shaniqua Shekelstein', 'Moshe Goyowitz'). The pseudo-internalized discrimination does tend to fool the Twitter Trust & Safety reviewers, and these accounts can be harder to squash for that reason.
• Do not post critical tweets in @jack's timeline with the same account that you use to report Nazis. You will risk getting your account restricted in an unusual way — no more updates on suspended accounts for you! You can still report Nazis but it makes it much harder to repeat report the same Nazis and eventually get them permabanned.

No matter how vile an account is, it is unlikely that it will get permanently suspended on the first-go. Some temporary suspensions are as short as one minute. Twitter will inform you of accounts that one has reported that have received suspensions, and one should return to the account to review the timeline for additional violations. Some accounts have mainly offensive images and not much offensive text, so it's worthwhile going through the images sometimes.

If you're using a separate, locked account, you'll need to show some activity other than reporting Nazis, otherwise you won't receive reports about your reported accounts. Follow a couple of public figures whom you like and who tweet regularly. Twitter will send you a daily report at varying times in your notifications about accounts that you're reported and that they've punished, but usually you'll only receive notifications if you show activity, such as retweeting someone, or tweeting yourself.

It appears that reporting Nazis too often can result in a cessation of Twitter giving updates to your account when Twitter punishes Nazis, thus disabling the primary too for getting Nazis banhammered: rereporting them for continued violations.

Twitter does a really shitty job overall about punishing Nazis. Twitter makes the faulty assumption that a suspension of a few minutes or hours will stop the bigoted or violence-inciting behavior. Even after permanent suspension of an account, the person often comes back under a new incarnation and then solicits their old 'frens' to follow their new account.

Twitter also does not understand bigotry or violence incitement very well. For example, reporting a tweet with the Islamophobic, Genocide-celebrating text 'remove kebab' is likely to result in at least a temporary suspension, but tweeting 'Holocauster', 'Holohoax' or other forms of Holocaust denial does not seem to result in suspension as often. Paul Ramsey (@ramzpaul, 61K followers), David Duke (52K+ followers, @DrDavidDuke), Henry Makow (18K+ followers, @HenryMakow), and Russia Insider (37K followers, @RussiaInsider) get away with constant tweeting about the Zionist Occupation Government and other antisemitic tropes, and it doesn't bother Twitter Inc.

ADL analysis

In 2018, the ADL conducted an analysis of antisemitism on Twitter for the period January 29, 2017 to January 28, 2018. The period of analysis preceded so-called "Twitter Purge" of February 2018 when Twitter purged thousands of bot accounts, some of which might have been associated with antsemitism. The ADL analysis found that there were an average of 81,400 antisemitic tweets during the period of analysis. An 'impressionistic' review of the data found that the antisemitic tweets fell within a few broad themes:

• Harvey Weinstein and Jewish sexual predators
• Rothschild conspiracy theories
• Anti-Zionism as a cover for Antisemitism
• QAnon
• Globalist as a code-word for Jew
• Holocaust denial
• False flags
• George Soros

Notably, at the time of the report, Twitter was the only social media organization that made its data available to researchers, and Twitter has included the ADL as part of its Trust and Safety Council. ADL made several recommendations to Twitter based on its research findings:

• Explore avenues for external review and input
• Ensure a comprehensive Terms of Service that is adequately enforced
• Do not depend only on account removal
• Use artificial intelligence to enhance efforts to identify hateful content
• Ensure users have an effective option that decreases the chances they encounter hate speech

Twitter did respond to these recommendations by making more than 30 changes to its policies, including:

• Making affiliation with Violent Extremist Groups against its Terms of Service
• Making hateful imagery harder to find by labeling it as sensitive content and banning it from profile and header pictures.
• Communicating its rules more clearly to violators
• Improving how Twitter reviews abuse reports filed by third-party witnesses.

Notably, Dorsey reported to Congress in 2018 that "Twitter uses a combination of machine learning and human review to adjudicate abuse reports and whether they violate our rules." Yet, the 'machine learning' is seemingly so feeble that two years later, it is unable to recognize the most obvious racist slurs, tropes or conspiracy theories.

Inspiration

“”About us: Even if you hate us, we don't hate you. No race has a monopoly on good or bad deeds. Your skin color is the least interesting thing about you. Blaming Jews, liberals, or any one group or ideology just distracts you from getting your shit together. We know there’s a lot you’re angry about, and you want answers. You want to blame someone. Everything is complicated, and complicated is confusing. If your answer is simple, it’s probably wrong. If your answer requires hundreds of people in a conspiracy together, it’s probably wrong. Try getting 10 people to agree where to go to lunch and you’ll see. There is no secret truth to history except people are flawed. Hating others is bad for you. It keeps you from a full life. It’s holding you back. Our goal here is to get hate off Twitter, by reporting it and by engaging with it. To poke holes in the conspiracies where we can and deplatform where we can't.

—Naxis Getout

One inspiring account on Twitter is @GetOutNaxis (Naxis Getout); the account has an image of Brad Pitt from his role as Nazi hunter from the Quentin Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds.

The hashtag #DeplatformHate is associated with Twitter users who try to deplatform accounts that spread hate speech on Twitter.

See also

• Alt-right glossary
• Manosphere glossary
• Transgender glossary

External links

• The Alt-Right Twitter Census Defining and Describing the Audience for Alt-Right Content on Twitter by J. M. Berger, (2018) VOX-Pol
• Why Twitter has been slow to ban white nationalists: It's just not as easy as eliminating terrorism by Casey Newton (Apr 26, 2019, 6:00am EDT) The Verge

References

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