Thread by @jdpoc

Yhread : On simple technical solutions to fighting online racism and other forms of hatred.

Last night after the England gane, and the resultant avalanche of racist vitriol aimed at a handful of players, we put out an alert / appeal on Twitter:

Well, after last night's post we've had a busy day.

Yes, we were - still are - covering other soc med platforms, and other players.

We have automated scripts for this.
The flood on the accounts of Rashford, Saka and Sterling tailed off from 2.00am onwards.

The data we accumulated is still being worked through, but of over 6500 hits, we assess that over 1000 are identifiable.

For nearly 150, we already have names and towns.

For nearly 100. we have employers.

At some point later today we will be emailing a list to police and the clubs/agents of the players involved, the latter in case they wish to take further action.

We shall not be 'doxxing' - releasing the details of the identities of the persons we have ID'd.

We *shall* however, be passing the data onto their employers where they can be identified without doubt

We've been here before and as they say, this is not our first rodeo.

Current Hit Total : 6614
Identifiable : 1109+
Identified : 158... but it's early days yet.

We do this with elegantly simple scripts. Last night I went into the technical aspects of how the tools work, I shall not bore all you non-geeks with the details :-)

One thing our scripts weren't able to do was pick out certain emoji codes. Even with API access. You know the ones we mean.

But we hashed together a script that was able to do so about 4.00am. Tested, and it works.

You may wonder how a handful of geeks and IT veterans, with a few scripts and a trio of second hand £50 servers, can do this and Twitter / Instagram / Facebook can't.

The answer, of course, is that Twitter / Instagram / Facebook can but choose not to.

Again, our thanks to everyone who sent us screenshots.

Our OCR tool is working through them. We cannot reply to everybody personally - you know who you are, and thank you.

Our team is 11 people, on a tiny budget, with the passion to burn our hours fighting all kinds of hatred and bigotry.

If we can do this, Football Clubs can do this.
If we can do this, Police can do this.
If we can do this, Twitter / Instagram / Facebook can certainly do this.

You may wonder why we go after their jobs. A valid question we were asked a lot last night.

Simply, we will use every legal approach to fight bigotry and hatred. We're through with softly, softly.

We're done with playing nicely.

We will shame them in their communities. Within their families. At their workplaces.

We shall not dox publicly, but we *will* ensure everyone around them knows what kind of people they are.

Racism, is not born, it is learned.

It can be unlearned.

Meanwhile, do not be despondent.

Our youth, and the youth of the world, care far less about race and skin colour, or nationality, or sexual preference, or faith.

Have confidence in the coming generations.

Thread ends.

By the way, we all do this in our limited spare time, running on coffee.

If you want to buy us that coffee you can do so here :

paypal.com/donate?token=6…

Oh, and don't stop sending us this stuff. Keep it coming. Fill our inbox. #Challenge.

For some, that link seems to be not working. An issue at the Paypal end, we think.

Here's an alternative link :

farrightwatch.net/p/donate-to-ou…

We hear a lot of "This isn't the best way to fight #Racism."

Is it not ? Maybe so, maybe not.

There is no *one* way to fight. Come up with a better way, and do your thing. Meanwhile, we do our thing.

#Racism is rooted in a hundred causes, and must be fought in a hundred ways.

I often work Sundays (a lot of my work has to be done during server down-time) and I did so yesterday.

I *had* planned for today to be a day off. Not gonna happen, is it ? And I really don't mind. I have coffee, the company of cats, code to run and racists to hunt.