don’t use randi harper’s blocklist. use naziblocker instead.
i’m not a nazi. i am not an mra. i am not a gamergater.
but i’m on a very influential blocklist that claims to be “mostly” these types.
to be fair, i’m sure “most” of the other people on randi lee harper’s blocklist are people that deserve to be on there, but there are also a lot of people who don’t. too many people. people that really shouldn’t be on there, like trans people and social justice types. or maybe you just got misunderstood or on someone’s bad side.
to quote the article i just linked:
Randi obviously can block for whatever reasons she wants, colour of hair, use of oxford comma, anything. It becomes a problem when she shares her own personal dislikes with people as a list that is advertised as 99.9% abusive MRAs and Gators, blocking these people from many influential people on Twitter. She has a platform and people trust that the accounts she blocks are abusive people, not trans people concerned at her lack of allyship.
that platform includes people like wil wheaton, who shares randi’s personal blocklist and has his own pinned to his profile. whenever randi blocks someone, wil will automatically be blocking that person. and so on, propagating through a chain of blocklists based on who follows which list. efforts to unblock these false positives are several orders of magnitude less visible.
instead, use nazi blocker.
per a conversation with nazi blocker:
Hi! If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask a few questions for clarification about this list.
Sure! Ok, let’s see…
1) Is this based on a specific account’s personal blocklist, or is it dedicated only to openly fascist accounts? I ask because Randi Harper’s Gamergate blocklist also includes her personal vendettas against people who have called her out for transphobia, contains a disturbing amount of false positives, and is shared by influential people such as Wil Wheaton.
No, this block list is not from a personal account. When people harass me on this account, I just mute them so that they won’t be on the block list, or I report and mute them. I do my best to keep personal vendettas out of this, although if someone is harassing my main account and I find out that hey, turns out they’re also a holocaust denier, or if they start saying a bunch of antisemitic nonsense to me, then yeah, I’ll add them, just like I would if someone submitted a report. That’s a tiny minority of the people on the list thought, and when feuds are unrelated to the topic of this block list, I do not add people I block personally to the shared list. That’s why this account is separate from my private account.
2) What is the criteria or methodology of this list? Does it block by keywords, or is it manually curated? If there’s any automation, what are the keywords or conditions being used?
This account is entirely hand curated by me. My main account is @Bathyspherehat. I search for certain keywords just about every day, but I review the accounts before blocking. That doesn’t mean I can’t accidentally click the wrong thing occasionally. …
I think false positives with this sort of thing are kind of inevitable, but I do my best to avoid them. As for criteria… I keep meaning to make a more extensive official list, but I made a list of examples of things that can get you blocked here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-does-nazi-6799335
Sometimes there are people who haven’t done one of those things exactly, but, say, they’re claiming to be Jewish, using a bunch of stereotypes for their persona (so they pretty obviously aren’t) and then using words wrong and shit, and supporting people on the alt-right.
So the methodology is necessarily a little messy, you know? I can’t make a definitive list of everything that gets people blocked, because some things are just… you know them really clearly when you see them, but describing every scenario would be ridiculous.
And they’re also always coming up with new terms and shit, like “skypes” for “k*kes”, and I’d be doing twice the work just explaining all that. Plus, some of the advantage of subscribing to the list is that people who subscribe don’t have to learn all that. I take care of it.
But I never ever use block chains or anything like that. I do searches, I take submissions, I look at high profile targets’ mentions sometimes, I look at high profile white supremacists’ followers, stuff like that. I hope that answers that question well enough? Nothing is automated about curating the block list. And the standards rely on my opinion, but I try to keep myself as informed as possible.
3) Is there any sort of appeal process for false positives, or any sort of review?
That’s a tricky one. There’s no formal appeal process at the moment, and I’m not sure how to make one without getting spammed constantly by actual Nazi types, you know? At the moment, I encourage people who follow me and use the list to let me know if they find someone strange on the list, and I go back through the list to find false positives when I can. I’ve had a couple corrections, which is encouraging in a way, because it means people are able to get through to me sometimes through other people. People can contact me through my main account though, which is why I don’t subscribe on that account. I’m just not sure how to let them know they can.
Thank you for your time!
