Data scientist doxing trump supporters

[libertysnake]

This is why you limit what you post online.

The data scientist exposing US white supremacists: 'This is how you fight Nazis'

After surviving far right violence in Charlottesville, Emily Gorcenski has tracked the Proud Boys and other extremist groups

www.theguardian.com

So, she's not just using pictures and doing searches based on those pictures. She's basically using vast amounts of third party data, from various sites, and performing analysis on it. In terms of a breakdown of what is going on here:

1. Data is being pulled from websites, either via crawling them and scraping / archiving posts, or (more likely) she's pulling posts via an API (Application Protocol Interface) from websites like Facebook, Reddit, etc.
2. Data is then transformed into a format that can be processed. It's probably piped into a holding place like Kafka / AWS Kenesis before it's pulled into what's called an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipeline. Normally it means you're taking the data in, removing garbage info you don't want, and renaming some data so it's all uniform before loading it into a large database for searching quickly.
3. Next the data is processed. Normally you'll aggregate information and create some useful tables (basically spreadsheets) of information so you can identify bigger trends, and then use those bigger trends to limit what data you have to sort through for your answers. In this case she may be looking like where the word "MAGA" is used most often to narrow down what communities to search / do analysis into, or something very high level / superficial.
4. Last is analysis. Sometimes Datascientists do this this directly, but more often they'll pass it to machine learning (IE, something like AWS Sagemaker / Datalab (google) / Databricks). This could be looking for correlations / word usage. Something like "The people on a certain right wing website use this terminology. What individuals on facebook have the highest incidences of using those same words out of the target communities from step #3?" And based on that trying to narrow down identities by probability.

What I'm getting at here is that it's not enough to just "not" post anything directly compromising anymore like your name, or address. That's not enough. You should drop main social media almost all together, as it's being weaponized against you in ways you don't realize.

This is why I'm absolutely against weaponizing data science for this purpose. It's 1984 type shit.

 

[pjzwtl]

May the miss deeds caused by her actions come home to roost

 

[repete]

Damn! That must've a real tall ugly tree she fell out of!

 

[libertysnake]

May the miss deeds caused by her actions come home to roost

It's sort of a pandora's box. Think of it like this. Think of the social justice / call out culture, except you up the efficiency millions of times in how quickly and easily these call outs / pressuring of businesses can be done.

 

[SonOfSun]

Damn! That must've a real tall ugly tree she fell out of!

I'd be surprised if "she" didn't have a dong.

 

[MothMan]

She relocated to Berlin to be far away from US white supremists.

But German white supremists are okay??

 

[SonOfSun]

What I'm getting at here is that it's not enough to just "not" post anything directly compromising anymore like your name, or address. That's not enough. You should drop main social media almost all together, as it's being weaponized against you in ways you don't realize.

This is why I'm absolutely against weaponizing data science for this purpose. It's 1984 type shit.

Snipped a lot of your OP, hope you don't mind, mainly wanted to respond to this part. I actually work with data as a large portion of my work, though focused more on internal processes, I mostly use SQL data stores and R / Python for analysis and modeling...

Anyways, dropping social media won't do dick for you. They build shadow profiles, in other words even if you don't sign up they build a profile for you that is private to them. They get the data from a lot of places, but a good portion is from your acquaintances and things you probably don't even know or think about. Things like you go bowling with a friend and they post on Facebook, "going bowling with Joe and Jane Smith". In this case Joe Smith didn't need to post for Facebook to get the info, their friends volunteered it for them. They'll pull things like Exif image tags for GPS and device IDs from the images as well. The level of data harvesting done is obscene. Point being here, even if you opt out of social media, you can't necessarily opt out.

 

[Catskillkid]

Damn! That must've a real tall ugly tree she fell out of!

I'd be surprised if "she" didn't have a dong.

If you read the Guardian article it implies she's trans.

The data scientist exposing US white supremacists: 'This is how you fight Nazis'

 

[prambo]

Find, Fix, Finish...

Wash and repeat.

 

[Blimey]

Snipped a lot of your OP, hope you don't mind, mainly wanted to respond to this part. I actually work with data as a large portion of my work, though focused more on internal processes, I mostly use SQL data stores and R / Python for analysis and modeling...

Anyways, dropping social media won't do dick for you. They build shadow profiles, in other words even if you don't sign up they build a profile for you that is private to them. They get the data from a lot of places, but a good portion is from your acquaintances and things you probably don't even know or think about. Things like you go bowling with a friend and they post on Facebook, "going bowling with Joe and Jane Smith". In this case Joe Smith didn't need to post for Facebook to get the info, their friends volunteered it for them. They'll pull things like Exif image tags for GPS and device IDs from the images as well. The level of data harvesting done is obscene. Point being here, even if you opt out of social media, you can't necessarily opt out.

These apps love people to tag people in images. People make it very easy to have all their data collected.

I do still eschew social media because why make it so easy for them. But beyond that it is poisonous anyway. Every study shows it diminishes mental health. Nobody should be on these platforms really.

 

[libertysnake]

I actually work with data as a large portion of my work

Same. Hence why this is a big deal to me. Sure advertising takes an obscene amount of your data for profit. But this, this is something else. Far more twisted.