Twitter Reinstates Woman Who Tweeted Screenshots Of Her Trolls' Abuse

Alexandra Brodsky is a co-founder of Know Your IX, an organization that advocates for students’ rights to an education free from gender-based violence. She now works at National Women’s Law Center. This weekend Brodsky received a number of harassing tweets from anti-semitic trolls, replete with holocaust imagery and phrases like, “Welcome to Trump's America. See you in the camps!” Brodsky promptly reported the tweets to Twitter and screen-shotted the offending tweets. Then, “to highlight the new normal in Trump&039;s America and put pressure on Twitter to suspend the users,” she tweeted those screenshots to her 5,047 followers.

Hours later, according to Brodsky, Twitter locked her account, telling her that she&039;d need to delete the offending images in order to regain access to it. Brodsky&039;s trolls, meanwhile, had not been suspended. “So let&039;s get this straight: Twitter still hasn&039;t suspended all the bigots I reported, but they have suspended me for calling out bigotry,” Brodsky wrote in a post to her Facebook page Monday morning. “I call bullshit.”

Shortly after BuzzFeed News asked Twitter about its decision to freeze Brodsky&039;s account and not those of her harassers, the company unlocked it and issued the following statement:

Hello,

Twitter takes reports of violations of the Twitter Rules very seriously. After reviewing your account, it looks like we locked it by mistake.

We have unlocked your account, and we apologize for this error.

Thanks,

Twitter

This isn&039;t the first time Twitter has responded to abuse violations only after being called to action by a media request for comment. On November 2nd, Twitter suspended trolls using misinformation to disenfranchise Black and Latino voters only after being contacted by BuzzFeed News (previously the company replied to an individual user that the tweets did not violate company rules). Four days later, when the company responded to user reports of more false voter information, its action again followed an inquiry from BuzzFeed News. Likewise, in separate instances this summer, Twitter reversed decisions to keep up an ISIS beheading photo and a number of threats of rape only after media inquiries into those incidents.

Quelle: <a href="Twitter Reinstates Woman Who Tweeted Screenshots Of Her Trolls&039; Abuse“>BuzzFeed

This Is How Google Wants To Make The Internet Speak Everyone’s Language

Nurhaida Sirait, a grandmother that speaks the native Batak language and uses Facebook on her smartphone to connect to friends and family, poses for a portrait.

Andri Tambunan for BuzzFeed News

JAKARTA, Indonesia — When Nurhaida Sirait-Go curses, she curses in her mother tongue.

The 60-year-old grandmother does everything emphatically, and Bahasa, the official language of Indonesia, just doesn’t allow for the same fury of swearing as Bakat, the language that Sirait-Go grew up speaking on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

“On Facebook, on Whatsapp, they speak only Bahasa. So I can’t speak the way I want,” said Sirait-Go, who giggles uncontrollably and covers her mouth with both hands when asked to repeat one of her favorite curse words in Bakat. “I can’t, I can’t&#033; People don’t use these words anymore. … They aren’t on the internet so they don’t exist.”

Bakat is one of over 700 languages spoken in Indonesia. But only one language, Bahasa, is currently taught by public schools and widely-used online. For language preservationists, it’s just one more example of how the internet’s growing global influence is leaving some languages in the dust. Linguists warn that 90% of the world&#039;s approximately 7,000 languages will become extinct in the next 100 years. Or, as one prominent group of linguists ominously put it, every 14 days another language goes extinct.

The trend that started hundreds of years ago, as the idea of a “nation state” took hold globally, with governments realizing that a standardized language would help them stand out as a nation state and solidify an identity inside their borders. That process, which sped up as languages like French and English became dominant languages among traders and then diplomats, went into overdrive as the internet’s sweeping reach has encouraged users to engage in the language with the highest common denominator.

Linne Ha, a program manager at Google who focuses on low resource languages, estimates that there are at least thirty languages with one million speakers each that are currently not supported online — and there are many many more with less than a million speakers. If you were to imagine all those people as one group, it would be a country roughly the size of the United States which couldn’t type online, let alone use the text-to-speech function that make things like Google Maps reading you your directions as you drive possible.

“We are biased because all of the equipment is designed for us,” Ha told BuzzFeed News. “The first thing, the default, is an English language keyboard, but what if your language doesn’t use those characters, or what if your language is only spoken, but not written?”

According to the UN, roughly 500 languages are used online, though popular sites like Facebook and Twitter support just 80 and 28 respectively. Those sites also display their domain names, or URLs, in Latin letters — for millions of people around the world, the letters www.facebook.com are nothing more than a string of shapes to be remembered or copy/pasted into an address bar. The internet, largely in English, does not feel as though it was built to speak their language.

Facebook profile page of Nurhaida Sirait, a grandmother that speaks the native Batak language and uses Facebook on her smartphone to connect to friends and family.

Andri Tambunan for BuzzFeed News

Ha worries about whether or not the internet is harming the world’s diversity of languages. She has been working Google for ten years, the last two of which she has had the unique job title of “voice hunter” for Google’s Project Unison. Getting a language online means everything from developing a font, which can cost upwards of $30,000 to design and code, to recording and creating voice capabilities for the language that power programs like Google Maps. It’s the voice part that Ha is focused on. As many parts of the world come online which use spoken, rather than written languages, it’s become more important than ever to be able to use speak functions on the internet.

“In much of the world the phone, specifically using your voice commands on the phone, that is the standard way to communicate,” said Ha. “These are places where there is more of an oral tradition than a written one.”

The Wu language, spoken by roughly 80 million people in the Shanghai region of China, is a prime example. Spoken Wu has many characters that cannot be written with standard Chinese characters, and the language is rarely written as schools only teach students to read and write in Mandarin. For Wu speakers to be fully immersed in using and conversing on the internet, a function must be created for them to be able to speak, and hear, their language online.

Others, she said, were simply not easy to adapt to the average keyboard. The Khmer language, which is spoken by 18 million people in Cambodia, includes 33 consonants, 23 vowels, and 12 independent vowels.

“On the type of keyboards you get on your phone they have to click and go through three sets of keyboards to type in one word. It’s cumbersome,” said Ha. The solution, Ha says, is what’s called a “transliteration keyboard,” where spoken words take the place of a traditional keyboard.

“Previously, in order to create a voice, a speech synthesis voice, you would need to record really good acoustic data, and have all the different sounds of a language,” said Ha. That required bringing in a “voice talent”, or a local with what Ha calls the perfect voice, a voice that any native person of that language would find pleasant and easy to understand. They were joined by a project manager and 3-4 people in a recording studio. The process, Ha said, would take six months or more to record all the necessary sounds which make up a language. “It was really really expensive.”

Ha, however, helped develop a way to use machine learning, otherwise known as artificial intelligence (AI), to bring a new language online in a matter of days. The new process takes advantage of what’s known as a “neural network,” a type of AI that tries to emulate the way a human brain works. Like a toddler learning which foods it likes and doesn’t like, the system works through trial and error, rewriting itself through patterns in the data it is given.

Ha said she got the idea for how to streamline the process one day while watching Saturday Night Live. “When I was watching SNL I saw all these comedians mimicking politicians. I thought that was interesting, one person pretending to be different people,” said Ha. A handful of voices, she realized, when sent through a system capable of analyzing them and recognizing patterns, could be enough to create a complete language database.

She began with a team of 50 Bengali speakers in Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. Ha’s team built a web app which could run on a ventless laptop (fans would distort the recording) and recorded the voices of the Bengali Google employees. She then ran a survey asking the group which voice they liked the best; once she had a reference voice, she then looked for voices that had a similar cadence.

“These volunteers, we didn’t want them to get tired. We had them speak in 45 minute increments, roughly 145 sentences. So in three days we got 2000 sentences,” said Ha. The system then built patterns out of the words and expanded the vocabulary. “With that we were able to build a model. It took three days to build a book of the Bengali voice.”

“The voice we created is a blend of seven voices. It’s like a choir”

Ha then built a portable recording booth, small enough to fit in a carry on, which she has now used to travel around the world. So far, she’s used it to bring three new languages online — Bengali, Khmer, and Sinhala — in the course of the last year.

“The voice we created is a blend of seven voices. It’s like a choir,” said Ha, reflecting on the finished voices they have presented to the public. Earlier this year she visited Indonesia, where she partnered with a local university and is working on bringing two more languages spoken in Indonesia, Javanese and Sundanese, online.

In Jakarta, Sirait-Go was “thrilled” to hear that Google was working to bring more languages online, though she was less impressed to hear their pilot program in that country had been with Javanese, rather than her native tongue of Batak.

“It would be much better for everyone if they could speak in Batak, they could express themselves better,” said Sirait-Go.

When asked about what she communicates online, she runs to the next room to bring back a pristine Samsung Galaxy phone her daughter bought her in May of this year. She keeps it in a separate room, on a shelf of its own, whenever she’s not using it.

“My kids tell me to use the internet, to not be old fashioned, but I don’t know what to do there,” said Sirait-Go, who recently welcomed her fifth grandchild. She opens her phone to show her 168 friends on Facebook (she has an additional 55 friend requests but isn’t sure how to answer them). Her Facebook page is largely made up of photos of Sumatra, particularly of Lake Toba, where she grew up.

“I have a video of the lake too&033; Someone is speaking in the video in Batak and that makes me happy to hear,” said Sirait-Go. Her daughters and grandchildren, she said, only use Batak when they are making fun of her.

“I don’t think my grandchildren or great grandchildren will learn Batak and that makes me sad,” she said. “If they cannot speak it on the internet they will not learn it.”

Quelle: <a href="This Is How Google Wants To Make The Internet Speak Everyone’s Language“>BuzzFeed

In 2016, An Anti-Troll Hero Came To My Rescue

Getty Images

As a “cuckkike” member of the “lugenpresse,” one frequently up to the “Jewish tricks” of trying to “spread fake news” about the new right internet, I spent much of this year absorbing horrific online abuse: Anonymous death threats, ad hominem screeds, gas chamber memes about dead relatives, phone calls to my bewildered parents, and so on. I like to think of myself as a “sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me” sort of guy. But man, this stuff takes a toll.

Yet, way far down, in furthest vantablack depths of my mentions, amidst the eggs and the Pepes and the iron crosses and the “Heinrich Hammlers,” I glimpsed this fall a glimmer of hope, and a potential way forward for all of us.

His name is Captain James T Kink, and he&#039;s an anonymous account with only 32 followers who started his Twitter life doing a parody schtick in the voice of a horny gay Star Trek captain. Yet however inauspicious his beginnings, I think Capt. Kink may be a hero.

He has certainly come to my rescue, time and time again. As of last week, Capt. Kink had tweeted 793 times. Of those 793 tweets, by my count, at least 160, or a fifth, are insults, invective, taunting, mockery, and sarcasm directed toward my trolls. (Bear in mind, Capt. Kink has been tweeting since 2013 and only took up the cause of owning my trolls in late August.)

He&039;s my anti-troll troll, a potty-mouthed, gold-hearted anonymous internet do-gooder with seemingly nothing better to do than troll the people who have nothing better to do than troll me. In one week alone, Capt. Kink swooped in to call various of my harassers “a shit flicking low brow,” a “filthy paedo,” “stiff as a broomstick for Joe,” a virgin, and a “lukewarm Richard Spencer” who looks like “a middle aged Roger Moore.”

Kink is a brilliant troll, with the mouth of a sailor and the mind of a poet. Check out the simile he dropped on one “MRSADSONGHIMSELF” (bio: DEPLORABLE SHITPOSTER PRESIDENT ELECT DONALD J. TRUMP), who called me a “BLOCK HEAD” one recent weekend:

Yes, Capt. Kink can go high, but good lord, can he go low. MRSADSONGHIMSELF responded to the Louis XIV tweet with what he must have thought was a clever comeback. Poor lil&039; guy.

Bait taken, Capt Kink absolutely unloaded:

“Your dad watched” with no punctuation kills me. It&039;s a devastating cuckold joke without the now-ubiquitous epithet, tossed off as an afterthought: Your sexually explosive mother and I banged, and oh, I guess your dad was there too.

Capt. Kink&#033; He&039;s a very happy warrior. He calls my trolls babies, onanists, twats, farts, frenula. There&039;s no troll — or hate speech— too abominable for his pro-Joe Bernstein Twitter judo. He turns Holocaust jokes against themselves:

And in a move I regard as an act of genius, he defuses the alt-right&039;s constant invocations of free speech by posting shirtless pictures of Tom Selleck:

So who is this vulgar champion? And more importantly, what led him to become my personal Twitter henchman? Over email, Capt. Kink told me that he is an engineer from an English-speaking country. Like any hero worth his salt, he has an origin story:

“Six months ago I fell off a ladder (helping a plumber replace my water tank) and broke my shoulder. I was off work for two months with nothing to do but watch Dr Phil and start up my old Twitter account. I was horrified by the level of antisemitism, misogyny and anime. I can&039;t remember how I saw your besieged account but &039;Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do&039;.”

Yes, my Twitter guardian angel quotes Voltaire.

Look, I can&039;t say I don&039;t take some satisfaction in watching an anonymous account with an endless appetite for trolling do to my harassers exactly what they do to me. I do. I think any person who has faced the sheer volume of hatred that many of us have this year has fantasized about comprehensive and brutal retribution. So committed is Capt. Kink to my defense that my trolls have accused him of being me, and I in turn have half-wondered if I&039;m capable of some kind of unconscious, Tyler Durdenish projection. It&039;s not every day you discover your id outside your body.

But that&039;s not exactly why I love Capt. Kink. The traditional wisdom about trolls is that it&039;s best to ignore them, but that&039;s worked about as well for me as abstinence-only sex education has worked for the teenagers of America. What if we engaged? When Capt Kink gets involved with my trolls, a funny thing happens: They stop trolling me. They either get bogged down in endless shitfights with Kink, or else they disappear. It seems to me that trolling is typically a fairly frictionless experience for the troll. Adding almost any outside opposition seems to cause a fair number of them to scurry under other bridges.

None of which is to say I don&039;t still get harassed. I get harassed constantly. Capt. Kink is unfortunately just one man and, for the time being, sui generis. It took a specific set of circumstances and a bottomless appetite for conflict to create him.

(Kink, bless his soul, said via email that he&039;s “surprised more people aren&039;t challenging this type of behaviour.”)

Still, imagine an army of Capt. Kinks. Imagine Capt. Kink at scale: A thousands-strong justice league of anti-trolls, descending on every two-bit neo-Nazi and antisocial shitposter on every social platform around the world, armed to the gills with hurtful jibes and state of the art memes, fighting an epic war of flame attrition, freeing the rest of us to do our jobs.

I can see it in my mind&039;s eye, and friend, it&039;s beautiful.

Okay, I know how this sounds. But it&039;s not that crazy. A guy in Foreign Policy magazine suggested we do it to ISIS&033; And if tech companies can set up bug bounties, paying black-hat hackers to contribute meaningfully to society, there has to be a way to incentivize hatemongering trolls to use their powers for good. Maybe present it to them in the form of a Suicide Squad meme. I don&039;t know. The point is, Captain James T. Kinks don&039;t grow on trees.

But I&039;d like to see what would happen if we made more of him. Because maybe, just maybe, the vaccine for the epidemic of online abuse that has ruined this year online contains a dose of the disease.

Quelle: <a href="In 2016, An Anti-Troll Hero Came To My Rescue“>BuzzFeed

Blac Chyna Is Promoting A Shady Student Loan Ripoff On Instagram

@blacchyna / Via instagram.com

Blac Chyna is using her vast social media presence to promote a deceptive and wildly expensive student loan forgiveness scheme, telling her 10.6 million Instagram followers they can call a phone number to “get rid” of their student loans “before it&#039;s too late and Obama is out of office.”

It&039;ll take 5 minutes, she says. “Hurry&#033;&033;&033; IT WORKS&033;”

It doesn&039;t. The Student Relief Center, the company in Chyna&039;s post, is one of hundreds of fly-by-night student loan operators that use social media to target borrowers. Via Facebook and Instagram, most promise to help students have their loans wiped away.

In reality, they charge hefty fees to do what anyone can do for free: sign up for the Education Department&039;s income-based repayment options, which fix student loan payments at a percentage of monthly earnings.

By charging hundreds or thousands of dollars for doing this, the student loan relief schemes extract money from people already struggling with debt. But they can be lucrative for the people promoting them — based on typical rates, Chyna could have been paid as much as $35,000 for her post promoting the scheme, according to Mike Heller, the president and CEO of Talent Resource, a celebrity lifestyle marketing company.

As Americans grapple with more than a trillion dollars of student debt, schemes targeting borrowers looking for a way out have become widespread. “Have you seen ads offering help with your federal student loans that seem too good to be true? They probably are,” reads a warning from the Secretary of Education about student debt relief scams.

youtube.com

The fees charged to former students by the company in Blac Chyna&039;s Instagram post — which was not marked as an ad — are astronomical, and carefully disguised. When BuzzFeed News called the Student Relief Center number yesterday, a representative said the company could arrange a “graduated payment plan,” where a borrower paying off a $20,000 loan would make two payments of $385, then pay $162.99 a month for 36 months, then begin paying $113 monthly.

But what they didn&039;t say, until further prodding, was that much of that money would go to the middleman, not loan repayments. Baked into the Student Relief Center&039;s plan were well over $2,200 in fees paid to the company, including a charge of $49.99 a month for 36 months, long after any paperwork had been filed with the government.

After the three-year time period, the representative said, the $49.99 monthly fees would become “optional” — though customers would be automatically enrolled in the payments.

Student debt forgiveness schemes like the Student Relief Center have come under increasingly harsh scrutiny in recent years. They charge sky-high fees, at times in violation of state law, for services that often involve little more than submitting free forms to the government. At worst, some companies charge hundreds and even thousands of dollars and then disappear without performing any services at all.

Representatives for Blac Chyna and the Student Relief Center did not respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News. The reality TV star&039;s initial Instagram ad was deleted on Wednesday; another ad was posted on Thursday afternoon.

Quelle: <a href="Blac Chyna Is Promoting A Shady Student Loan Ripoff On Instagram“>BuzzFeed

Apple's AirPods Aren't Worth It (Yet)

The wireless earbuds sync to iOS devices with ease – but there’s a lot of room for improvement.

When it unveiled the headphone jack-less iPhone 7, Apple announced an all-new wireless solution to go with it: cordless earbuds called AirPods that come with Siri and a slew of sensors packed inside. After an unusual month-and-a-half-long delay to “fine-tune” sound performance and battery life, the new earbuds are finally available (although there’s currently a six week wait). But you may want to hold off even longer.

I’ve been testing final production AirPods for about a week and pre-production AirPods since September. The pods don’t fall out nearly as easily as one might expect of an earbud-on-a-stick that dangles precariously from one’s ear, and I was equally impressed by the AirPods’ unique wireless technology that eliminates the fussiness of Bluetooth. But Siri-only volume control and the AirPods’ one-size-fits-all form factor aren’t ideal – and show that there’s a lot of room for improvement.

BuzzFeed News

Here’s what’s working.

The AirPods are small, lightweight, and hyper portable.

The main benefit of wireless earbuds is their portability. No cord means no tangled mess and no bulk. The AirPods aren’t exactly discreet (more on this later), but they are lighter than other wireless buds I’ve tried (Samsung’s Gear IconX, Bragi’s Dash and the upcoming Headphone).

The AirPods package feels as light as a pack of Tic Tacs, and its smooth, dental floss-sized case slips easily into tight pant pockets. Together, the AirPods weigh just .28 ounces, which is about the weight of a quarter, while the charging case is 1.34 ounces — so altogether about as much as a single Kit Kat bar. In your ear, you’ll feel the hard plastic-ness of the AirPod, but you won’t ever feel bogged down by its weight.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

They do a great job of staying in your ear.

I did my least favorite form of cardio for an hour to capture this treadmill timelapse. The AirPods stayed in my ears the entire time.

I really tried to get these buds to come out: I biked to work with one of them in, I headbanged to Slayer, and I tried shaking them out of my ears (even upside down&#033;). Nada.

Movement won’t dislodge the AirPods, but as soon as there’s some external interference, they immediately lose their mythical staying power. The stem is susceptible to getting caught on things like clothing, hair, and helmets. I took off my sweater and an AirPod went flying. I tucked my long-ish hair behind my ear and the same thing. The helmet strap didn’t remove the AirPod from my ear, but it did jostle it around, which is unnerving when you’re biking on the very crowded streets of San Francisco.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

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Quelle: <a href="Apple&039;s AirPods Aren&039;t Worth It (Yet)“>BuzzFeed

Goat Simulator Will Change Your Life

This morning I opened up the iOS App Store and was astounded to find a thing called “Goat Simulator” at No. 4.

U serious? Goat Simulator?

So, I downloaded the game. And at first, it seemed very, very dumb. I was just a goat walking around in a yard. That was it&#033;

But then, something magical happened. I found a “jump” button. Immediately upon discovering this, my goat leapt out of the yard and was free&033; Peace, other goats. Catch you never.

Freedom can be intoxicating. My goat immediately started making bad decisions, and showed a blatant disregard for traffic rules.

Then my goat found a protest. I&#039;m all for democracy, but this game has a head-butt button, and I wasn&039;t going to spend all day staring at it.

The signs say “No pointy food.”

Then it was time to rough up the neighbors with the loud music.

Hope that sends a message. You fucked with the wrong goat.

My goat then dragged one of the neighbors around with its tongue for good measure.

Even though my goat was largely on a terrorizing rampage, it did do some productive stuff.

Like slide down this water slide and catapult itself into the bushes.

But breaking stuff was more fun. So my goat concentrated on that.

Into the drink you go, sir.

Sorry, can I help you with something?

Yeah, didn&039;t think so.

Things change fast in goat world.

Soon enough, my goat was wearing a jet pack and jumping on a trampoline.

Some may view my goat as a villain, and they may be right. But…

…remember, this goat world is a simulation. And those aren&039;t real people getting hurt. Maybe the goat is all of us, and those people are the kinds who would like to keep us down. The goat is hope, the goat is courage, the goat is triumph.

When life gives you hurdles, jump right over them.

Don&039;t try this at home.

Quelle: <a href="Goat Simulator Will Change Your Life“>BuzzFeed