Pay-to-troll: infamous troll "weev" deploys paid Twitter ads
May 6, 2015 3:45 AM   Subscribe

Infamous troll, Andrew "weev" Auernheimer, has annoyed Twitter users by using purchased Twitter advertisements to bypass blocks and target controversial political messages at selected groups. By focusing ads at specific user demographics, he was able to spend very little money while optimizing for outrage.

Ars Technica writes: Though Auernheimer didn't say exactly which users/groups he chose to target in his trolling campaign, he listed examples that appeared to jive with the sample of angry responses that followed: people who are active in Democratic political campaigns or animal rights groups; women who shop for fine jewelry; followers of known feminist sites like Jezebel and Feministing.

Auernheimer created a storify to describe his technique and its consequences. His subsequent attempts to repeat this technique were apparently banned by Twitter Ads.
posted by theorique (69 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
You do realize he name searches obsessively because he literally has nothing to do?

He might be a sociopath, but he's not like his brethren psycho Kevin Mitnick. There's no Tesla's in his future.
posted by Yowser at 4:03 AM on May 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


He's also the defacto leader of GNAA, aka Ayy.
posted by Yowser at 4:07 AM on May 6, 2015 [4 favorites]


Remember: responding to promoted tweets costs the promoter money; it's up to you if you want to engage or report + block.
posted by sidereal at 4:10 AM on May 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


He's also the defacto leader of GNAA, aka Ayy.

Yeah, that's the sort of data that should be in the summary, because once I found out about that, I knew everything I needed to know.
posted by mikelieman at 4:26 AM on May 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


Come on Twitter, do something about it!
posted by oceanjesse at 4:27 AM on May 6, 2015


how do you make ten million buckaroos from hacking i don't understand
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 4:30 AM on May 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


Back in February, MeFi’s own waxpancake wrote about ‘Stupid Tricks with Promoted Tweets’. His article describes one of the basic ideas Auernheimer went with, using promoted tweets to send a message to a specific group of your choice:
You can, however, promote a tweet to a group of 500 or more Twitter users like, say, Twitter employees.
———
Or how about campaigning legislators for something you care about for a change?
posted by Martijn at 4:42 AM on May 6, 2015 [4 favorites]


And that's probably what Weev copied, Martijn. And then mixed up with some straight up lies.

Remember, weev went to jail because he knew how to write a script that counted from one to a million. He's no black wizard.
posted by Yowser at 4:50 AM on May 6, 2015 [4 favorites]


This is several kinds of ridiculous. weev isn't worth paying any attention; outraged Twitter users appear not to have done 30 seconds of Googling.

Why is this even on Metafilter? Isn't making an issue of this utterly banal, artless, mindless behavior just another way of feeding the trolls?
posted by iffthen at 4:57 AM on May 6, 2015 [10 favorites]


You're telling me that advertising can be used for nefarious purposes?!?
posted by entropone at 4:58 AM on May 6, 2015 [23 favorites]


You do realize he name searches obsessively because he literally has nothing to do?

He does. I twitted the Ars Technica article mentioning his nick and he favorited it and replied.
posted by sukeban at 5:00 AM on May 6, 2015


Don't these people have jobs? Where do they find so much time for being assholes?
posted by Dip Flash at 5:02 AM on May 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


I feel like it is a fairly major failure on his part that I didn't get one of these things. I am active in Democratic politics! I don't follow Jezebel or Feministing, because they're not my kind of feminism, but I am a feminist. Maybe it's because I don't buy a lot of jewelry?

Twitter's suggested tweets algorithm strikes me as being sort of a mess. I get suggested tweets for specific products I have searched for on Amazon, but other than that, I seem to get a lot of stuff that is very wrong about me. Like, maybe they're profiling me by gender and location and deciding that I'm going to be interested in a Christian dating site? Because I can't imagine that there is anything else about me that would suggest that. Facebook, too, has a weird profile of me. Pinterest, on the other hand, totally has my number. If weev had tried to troll Pinterest by searching for people who liked cooking casseroles from scratch, making fruit-based cocktails, knitting mittens, anything involving jello, and doing craft projects using glitter and mod podge, he totally could have targeted me with offensive pins.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:15 AM on May 6, 2015 [5 favorites]


Welp, this is where we were heading once the net became all about the bucks.
posted by Samizdata at 5:26 AM on May 6, 2015 [6 favorites]


This is one of many reasons why my only tweet is "Test."
posted by Nanukthedog at 5:28 AM on May 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


Calling him a troll does a disservice to "normal" trolls - he's straight up harassing people.

He also has tattooed a swastika on his chest and is a full blown Nazi.
posted by ymgve at 5:28 AM on May 6, 2015 [22 favorites]


Petition to replace the phrase "infamous troll" in the post with "noted neo-nazi".

On the other hand, I do support the abuse of Internet advertising, but I'd prefer it was done with surrealist art instead of hate speech.
posted by sixohsix at 5:33 AM on May 6, 2015 [15 favorites]


The word "troll" as a noun and verb related to online activities isn't useful anymore. It's too imprecise. The connotation of jokey button-pressing is now just a cover for abuse and harassment. And the ubiquity of "don't feed the trolls!" means we default to victim blaming. We need to call these people what they are.
posted by almostmanda at 5:42 AM on May 6, 2015 [20 favorites]


We need to call these people what they are.

Pathetic. Desperate for attention.....
posted by zarq at 5:44 AM on May 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Twitter is bad for conversation but good for dissemination. If you can find good people to follow, you can get good links to articles about your niche interests. So, for instance, in my Twitter feed right now there's a link to this Fintan O'Toole piece on Irish writing in the Great War, and this blog post on how to fix political reporting in the Des Moines Register. Yesterday I posted a comment linking to that Gloucester, MA police chief's blog post, and then someone made it in to a FPP. I found that because someone linked it on Twitter. So yeah, I appreciate Twitter, although I think it's almost never a good venue to have a discussion, and it's literally never a good venue for arguments.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:45 AM on May 6, 2015 [5 favorites]


Twitter is bad for conversation but good for dissemination.

It can be quite good for both, actually.
posted by zarq at 5:46 AM on May 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Why is this even on Metafilter? Isn't making an issue of this utterly banal, artless, mindless behavior just another way of feeding the trolls?

I found it interesting that Twitter is attempting to simultaneously (1) monetize without driving people away from their platform and (2) deal with antisocial behaviors such as verbal harassment and pile-ons that do drive people away from their platform (most recently Joss Wheedon if the news is accurate).

What this experiment shows is that even as they are attempting to implement solutions to the "unwanted communication" problem, the process of monetization creates additional vulnerabilities that can lead to even bigger problems of unwanted communication. In other words, how do you price trolls (or spammers) out of the market without filtering out regular advertising customers?

It also opens up questions about the whole "free service / 100% ad supported" on which many major web sites are based.
posted by theorique at 5:48 AM on May 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


Previously

Hyper-specific targeted advertising is the culmination of everything that is wrong with the internet.
posted by Mayor West at 5:53 AM on May 6, 2015 [6 favorites]


...how do you price trolls (or spammers) out of the market without filtering out regular advertising customers?

You don't. It's a policy problem, not an economic one. Pretending otherwise merely provides cover to do the same thing this post does: give more power and attention to people who abuse it to take advantage of others with less.
posted by frijole at 6:04 AM on May 6, 2015 [11 favorites]


I can't wait until election season ramps up so that candidates can give me their reasoned analysis of their ability to hold office via Twitter ad.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:12 AM on May 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


Remember, weev went to jail because he knew how to write a script that counted from one to a million. He's no black wizard.

Not for nothing, but Daniel Spitler (aka "JacksonBrown") wrote the script in question and even pleaded guilty in court to doing so.

Weev went to jail for running a script that counted from 1 to a million, though that conviction was eventually vacated (for lack of standing in the jurisdiction that it was tried in, not for being completely bullshit in the first place.)
posted by atbash at 6:22 AM on May 6, 2015 [6 favorites]


Why is this even on Metafilter? Isn't making an issue of this utterly banal, artless, mindless behavior just another way of feeding the trolls?

Well, it reminds me of the furor over the campus paper refusing to run a big full-page display ad (which I can't find the discussion of in their archives) by some piece of human trash back in like 1990 or 1991: Twitter, like the editorial board, ought to be thinking about whether they are willing to be used as a platform to amplify someone else's speech.

The Daily's editors examined the content of the ad and decided that it did not comport with their view of what a newspaper should be; Twitter, on the other hand, will do anything for money and then throw up their hands in mock powerlessness when an actual [neo-] Nazi uses them as a patsy.

I think the only antidote to free speech is usually more speech, but this is in fact harassment and we have frameworks for dealing with such.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:25 AM on May 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


> ...drive people away from their platform (most recently Joss Wheedon if the news is accurate).

Whedon says he did not leave Twitter due to harassment.
posted by ardgedee at 6:31 AM on May 6, 2015 [8 favorites]


1: promoted tweets ignore blocks; this is probably not how Twitter wanted that publicized

2: the oh, weev effect: "When [Aurenheimer] speaks, or rants, or raves, he's taken at least half-seriously, with whatever makes us uncomfortable thrown out as 'Oh, Weev' trolling" (Sam Biddle, Gawker).
posted by subbes at 6:36 AM on May 6, 2015 [6 favorites]


He also has tattooed a swastika on his chest and is a full blown Nazi.

But is he a real neo-Nazi or a “HEY! Look at me! I'm a NAZI! I'm EEEVIL!1” attention-whore?
posted by acb at 6:52 AM on May 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


But is he a real neo-Nazi or a “HEY! Look at me! I'm a NAZI! I'm EEEVIL!1” attention-whore?

Who even cares?
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:57 AM on May 6, 2015 [61 favorites]


I have thought about buying targeted Twitter or cable TV ads for people who drive too slow in the fast lane, or who tailgate aggressively, but I can't figure out the right parameters.
posted by etherist at 6:58 AM on May 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


Yowser: He might be a sociopath, but he's not like his brethren psycho Kevin Mitnick. There's no Tesla's in his future.

As far as I've heard, Mitnick was known for social engineering his way into places for kicks and managed to parlay it into consulting gigs post-prison. Was there more to this?
posted by dr_dank at 7:02 AM on May 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


But is he a real neo-Nazi or a “HEY! Look at me! I'm a NAZI! I'm EEEVIL!1” attention-whore?

The question I tend to ask in this situation is, "what would a member of the usual victimized group think about the situation in the first second of an interaction?"

For example, would an 85 year old Holocaust survivor "get it" and say "silly old weev, he's such a troll", or would they be intimidated by the man with the big swastika tattoo?
posted by theorique at 7:09 AM on May 6, 2015 [4 favorites]


Twitter is great for finding people you admire saying cool things. "Black Twitter" especially has been an education for me, once I was following enough folks. Real life is still so segregated that it's hard to have those conversations or hear those opinions otherwise (especially in Texas, black people are going to take a while to trust you enough to say what they think, and who can blame them).

But I also follow a lot of cartoonists and feminists and authors and sometimes politicians in other states that are doing interesting things. Twitter also gives me a non-Facebook place to vent (I filter a lot on Facebook because family is there). One of the women I follow has two accounts, one she only uses when her hateful inlaws are in town to gripe about them. And it's terrible/hilarious.

As for this dude, well, there's always going to be people like him trying to keep us from having nice things. I hope Twitter can just take a no-harassment stance and refuse his business. Though to be honest, I don't pay much attention to any sponsored post.
posted by emjaybee at 7:13 AM on May 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


But is he a real neo-Nazi or a “HEY! Look at me! I'm a NAZI! I'm EEEVIL!1” attention-whore?

In some ways, the latter is worse. At least real neo-Nazis believe in what they're doing and think they're doing the right thing. Being an "ironic" Nazi means you know their ideology is evil as fuck, but you still pretend to be one purely to shock and provoke other people.
posted by ymgve at 7:15 AM on May 6, 2015 [6 favorites]


If you read Twitter's ad policies, there's a blanket ban on "sensitive topics" and content "likely to evoke a strong negative reaction". I'm sure these standards differ based on the country of advertiser and/or recipient.

I wonder if this is a recent change, since I certainly remember a lot of Twitter ads from a political organization practically celebrating the destruction of Gaza awhile ago (which makes me ponder the criteria by which I was targeted for said ads).

One thing's for sure though -- today's Twitter would much rather run Pizza Hut and Bud Light ads than deal with any of this shit.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:17 AM on May 6, 2015


Oh and then there was the delightful reversal of the hashtag #HowToSpotAFeminist by actual feminists, that was fun too.
posted by emjaybee at 7:18 AM on May 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


Yet another reason to install adblock on every browser you'll ever use?
posted by virga at 7:18 AM on May 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


But is he a real neo-Nazi or a “HEY! Look at me! I'm a NAZI! I'm EEEVIL!1” attention-whore?

Given fertile soil, history shows that one will blossom into the other. A million or more don't pop up overnight: the brazen ones normalize it first and then the wannabees who are suppressing it come out.
posted by George_Spiggott at 7:18 AM on May 6, 2015 [5 favorites]


Kevin Mitnick has a Tesla?!? I want a Tesla. Fuck that guy. Why does he get a Tesla?
posted by Naberius at 7:23 AM on May 6, 2015


(At the risk of a digression if not a derail, by this I don't mean to endorse hate speech laws. In point of fact I think they may do more harm than good; providing a kind of bog-cred martyrdom and turning the media coverage into a megaphone.)
posted by George_Spiggott at 7:45 AM on May 6, 2015


"He might be a sociopath, but he's not like his brethren psycho Kevin Mitnick."

I've never heard anybody call Mitnick a "psycho". Can you elaborate?
posted by I-baLL at 7:46 AM on May 6, 2015 [4 favorites]


But is he a real neo-Nazi or a “HEY! Look at me! I'm a NAZI! I'm EEEVIL!1” attention-whore?

There's no functional difference.
posted by dirigibleman at 7:50 AM on May 6, 2015 [9 favorites]


I only access twitter via the android app Plume. Never seen a promoted tweet. Never seen an ad tweet. I cannot stand twitter via web browser or the official app.

Plume also allows me to be logged into 3 accounts simultaneously so I have 3 columns, one for sports, one for lulz (weird twitter and comedians) and one for the abject horror of the human race (anti-ggs and race relations).

The thing I've noticed lately is that a lot of the people I follow for lulz are now participating with the anti-gg and the racial stuff (in good ways) so it really does seem like the harrasers are winning because everyone is engaging and talking about them.
posted by M Edward at 7:55 AM on May 6, 2015


I have thought about buying targeted Twitter or cable TV ads for people who drive too slow in the fast lane, or who tailgate aggressively, but I can't figure out the right parameters

Neither group is on Twitter. The first you'd have to harass via snail-mail. The second group via linked-in.
posted by ghostiger at 7:57 AM on May 6, 2015 [19 favorites]


I wonder how many lobbying firms buy tweets targeted for the PR firm running a politician's twitter account.
posted by benzenedream at 8:33 AM on May 6, 2015


This is all part of The Plan:

Step 1: Paid tweets. "Accidentally" allow horrible bullshit paid tweets.
Step 2: Paid blocks. Charge people to block paid tweets.
Step 3: Profit
posted by double block and bleed at 9:07 AM on May 6, 2015


I have FB friends in low places, and it gives me some view into Weev's life.

He's burned his bridges and has nothing left to do except make the cinders dance.

Pretty sad.
posted by ocschwar at 9:13 AM on May 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


This is all part of The Plan:

Step 1: Paid tweets. "Accidentally" allow horrible bullshit paid tweets.
Step 2: Paid blocks. Charge people to block paid tweets.
Step 3: Profit
posted by double block and bleed at 9:07 AM on May 6 
[+]     [!]


Hah! Sorry, but eponysterical. You even have the consequences.
posted by Arandia at 9:30 AM on May 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


"Pretty sad."

I think you typoed "Pretty funny."
posted by klangklangston at 9:30 AM on May 6, 2015


a blanket ban on ... content "likely to evoke a strong negative reaction" ... today's Twitter would much rather run ... Bud Light ads

Does not compute. Does not compute. [shower of sparks]
posted by zippy at 9:33 AM on May 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


It's semi-off topic, but Mayor West (and others): hyper specific advertising is actually one of the best things about the web and other forms of content distribution, because the better you can target ads for advertisers, the more they can pay you per impression, and the more that you can get paid per impression, the more you can pay for content or features per user. In other words, more targeting for advertisers = more / better content and features. Which is to say nothing of the fact that well-targeted advertising is actually valuable to the user (when a fashion lovers buys Vogue it's not to skip the first forty pages of ads, it's to study them as carefully as the editorial content that follows.)
posted by MattD at 9:39 AM on May 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Isn't making an issue of this utterly banal, artless, mindless behavior just another way of feeding the trolls?

Trolls feed on outrage, not on mild interest in a trick they got away with which was then blocked.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:42 AM on May 6, 2015


I had to look up GNAA to make sense of the comments here and just the Google hit for the wikipedia article made my day a little less bright. People suck sometimes.
posted by immlass at 9:44 AM on May 6, 2015


I've said before that it's looking like Twitter is going to be leading whatever "next tech crash" happens after the last bad earnings report (slightly larger loss than expected in spite of more revenue than expected) got the same kind of overreaction Twitter's IPO got (in the other direction - you could call it an 'overdue adjustment' but this is the Stock Market we're talking about). One Wall Street analyst is claiming that Twitter is preparing to 'purge' 10 million users... not because of trolling, but because they "post too much porn". I took a vacation from Twitter over a year ago and haven't yet returned. I'm going to consider M Edward's recommendation of the Plume app for any future engagement.
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:29 AM on May 6, 2015


CMD+F "Kathy Sierra" no results. As far as I'm concerned, weev is an assassin who took out a leader and the movement they were leading is the poorer for it.
posted by Brainy at 10:38 AM on May 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Say what you want about Twitter, but when I see a commercial on television it doesn't give me the chance to reply except ineffectually, talking to my TV. Twitter lets me actually reply with my bile in a public fashion. (I use #adriff to mark these.)

I'm amazed that promoted tweets don't have long lists of mocking replies. People should be more hostile to advertising generally, I think.
posted by JHarris at 12:00 PM on May 6, 2015 [5 favorites]


Christ, what an asshole.
posted by rmd1023 at 1:27 PM on May 6, 2015


by this I don't mean to endorse hate speech laws. In point of fact I think they may do more harm than good

Maybe you're not one; those of us who are the targets of hate speech tend to feel very, very differently about such laws.

Hate speech is just harassment by another name. We've had laws against it up here for ages, and the world hasn't suffered. Quite the opposite; they've prevented people like Zundel from promulgating his anti-Semitic rhetoric. They're used to punish people who spraypaint swastikas on Jewish schools and houses.

And they should be used to prosecute this assbag for what he does.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 2:32 PM on May 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm amazed that promoted tweets don't have long lists of mocking replies. People should be more hostile to advertising generally, I think.

No one wants to attract the gaze of the terrible Eye Of Sauron.
posted by zarq at 3:19 PM on May 6, 2015 [5 favorites]


I appreciate Twitter for Nihilist Arby's if nothing else. Arbys. Sandwiches. Fries. Seasonal shit.
posted by ostranenie at 8:23 PM on May 6, 2015


Weev has nothing on Katie Hopkins. She gets this stuff into top-selling national newspapers.
posted by Summer at 1:35 AM on May 7, 2015


And they should be used to prosecute this assbag for what he does.

In Europe this is certainly the case in law. People have literally gone to prison for publishing prohibited claims about the Holocaust - e.g. "it didn't happen" or "the numbers are greatly exaggerated" and so forth.

I'm not sure how far this would fly in the US, where the First Amendment provides much broader protections to free speech, even speech of a noxious or "hateful" nature.

(All of this is kind of moot since apparently weev is situated in Lebanon with no plans to return to the US.)
posted by theorique at 5:56 AM on May 7, 2015


I'm amazed that promoted tweets don't have long lists of mocking replies. People should be more hostile to advertising generally, I think.

In keeping with the principle that the answer to hateful speech is better, opposing speech, this is a great idea. One of the great things about twitter in specific, and the internet in general, is that if you don't like someone's speech, make your own. News and comment are no longer monopolized by a handful of channels pushing a unified narrative.
posted by theorique at 5:58 AM on May 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


Tell Me No Lies: Trolls feed on outrage, not on mild interest in a trick they got away with which was then blocked.

Fair. And the discussion here has been worthwhile which buttresses your point, I think.

The imp of the perverse has manifested, though, so let me ask a few things. weev's antisocial behavior on another social media platform resulted in a decent debate here. That debate, thanks to the civility and intellect of MeFites, has been productive. Is "trolling" then such a bad thing? Is weev's behavior so antisocial when it has positive second-order effects? Does it matter that those second-order, positive effects only occur if the initial, anti-social act garners attention, thereby playing into weev's hands?

I'm not advocating for weev's behavior, nor trolling in general, but nibbling around the edges of the logic that weev would (I think) use to justify his behavior, and thereby trying to turn more of this lead into gold.
posted by iffthen at 9:24 AM on May 7, 2015


That debate, thanks to the civility and intellect of MeFites, has been productive. Is "trolling" then such a bad thing?

Yes. Next question.
posted by dialetheia at 9:47 AM on May 7, 2015 [4 favorites]


What I-ball said.
posted by 3mendo at 12:19 PM on May 7, 2015




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