In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential victory, Yair Rosenberg decided to build a bot that would expose bigots on Twitter. As a Jewish journalist who reported on Trump’s presidential campaign, Rosenberg spent a lot of time getting harassed by internet racists. Rosenberg’s main target was impersonator trolls, who seek to assume Jewish or other minority identities and defame them. The impersonator lifts a photo of a Jew, Muslim, African-American or other minority, usually one who has clear identifying markers, and then uses that picture as a Twitter avatar. They add ethnic and progressive descriptors to the Twitter bio as well, and then insert themselves into conversations with high-profile Twitter users. It is within those conversations that the impersonators say horrifically racist things, and since the conversations are seen in passing, an entire community is defamed. The deception is disturbingly effective. So Rosenberg wanted to expose them. He created a bot that would reply to the imposters and expose their true nature to anyone they try to trick. But then, Nazis started to mass-report the bot for “harassment” and Twitter decided to side with the Nazis. The social media site suspended the bot and only reinstated it after being contacted by the ADL’s cyber-hate team. But Twitter suspended the bot again this month, and this time, refused to revive it. Rosenberg said that Twitter’s justifications are “entirely accurate and utterly absurd.”
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