Opinion | The Online Cacophony of Hate Against Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib

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  • Opinion | The Online Cacophony of Hate Against Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/opinion/ilhan-omar-rashida-tlaib.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

    Une étude très intéressante sur la propagation de haine via des robots. Si tout journaliste ou chercheur peut le faire, Twitter peut le faire. Il n’y a pas que la publicité politique qui peut détourner la démocratie, mais le coeur même de l’usage des médias sociaux, ici les tweets eux-mêmes.

    We published a study this week that found that, around the 2018 midterm elections, Ms. Omar and Ms. Tlaib were in the cross hairs of a tiny band of Islamophobes, long before Mr. Trump elevated them in his tweetstorms, and likely before they were even on his radar.

    We studied more than 113,000 tweets, posted from early September 2018 to the weekend before the election, that mentioned Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Omar Qudrat, a Republican congressional candidate in California who lost his race.

    Ilhan Omar was the prime target. Roughly half of the 90,000 tweets mentioning her included hate speech or Islamophobic or anti-immigrant language. Put another way, almost 60 percent of the network of accounts that mentioned or tagged her had posted at least one tweet containing hate speech or overt disinformation. Almost one-third of the tweets mentioning Ms. Tlaib were Islamophobic or xenophobic. Even Mr. Qudrat, a former military terrorism prosecutor, faced online harassment.

    But the most striking thing we uncovered happened in the months after the election. When we revisited these accounts in July, a significant portion of them were simply gone. Some had been suspended by Twitter for violating standards, such as posting inappropriate content or showing characteristics of bots. Others had been deleted by the account holders. Malicious actors will often remove the accounts that make up their bot networks — like drug dealers tossing burner phones — to cover their tracks.

    During the height of the campaign, there were 50,699 accounts in Ilhan Omar’s Twitter network. By July, 14 percent of those accounts were missing. Similarly, in Ms. Tlaib’s network, 11.9 percent of accounts in the network were either suspended or deleted. Still others had gone largely dormant.

    A large percentage of these trolls were likely bots or automated accounts run by people, organizations or state actors seeking to spread political propaganda and hate speech. That’s based on telltale iconography, naming patterns, webs of linkages and the breadth of the postelection scrubbing.

    This all suggests that this Islamophobic and xenophobic narrative largely originated with a handful of bigoted activists and was then amplified by vast bot networks whose alleged owners never existed. “Ordinary” account holders, many retweeting just one post, were then swept up in the rancorous energy of the crowd.

    There was no magic to what we did. If we can find the trolls, so can Twitter. If we can single out those using hate speech, so can Twitter. If we can map the bot networks, so can Twitter. This is about the platform taking responsibility and systematically enforcing its own standards, not passing the buck and blaming advertising while ignoring the fact that it is the true currency of Twitter — the tweets themselves — that bring “significant risks to politics” and “the lives of millions.”

    #Twitter #Fake_news #Islamophobie #Démocratie #Médias_sociaux