Bardfinn has posted many times about his personal blacklist of known wrongthinkers on Reddit. He refers to this blacklist as "my own private database" in this post:
Nah, we have you all tagged in MassTagger / Redhattracker and my own private database.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/f9pgyt/the_donald_is_taking_the_admins_seriously_after/fj7vdzx/ http://archive.is/ELVPz
In the post below he describes how he has fully automated the process of determining whom to censor on the subreddits he targets:
how deep did you dig
Software does it all. I literally make five mouse clicks and am presented with a rotating, automatically marked-up comment history -- from the depths of your comment and post history on Reddit to the present day.
https://www.reddit.com/r/beta/comments/d1ym3v/can_we_get_an_option_to_make_profiles_private/ezro02v/
This term, "comment history", suggests he's pulling redditors' profiles and not just the contents of those subreddits. Bardfinn aim is hence not just to mirror subreddits but to politically the redditors participating there.
But how many redditor entries does Bardfinn blacklist of wrongthinkers actually contain?
I run a neo-Nazi / white supremacist / violent troll tracking database.
It has 30,000+ entries.
https://www.reddit.com/r/masstagger/comments/i6s62n/suspicion_over_the_adding_of_rpolticalcompassmemes/g0y14pw/ http://archive.is/i0woD
That "30,000+ entries" claim is very likely another lie. Bardfinn has openly admitted elsewhere that he doesn't just profile specific Redditors, he rather pulls the contents of entire subreddits through the API. This means that Bardfinn has data-mined and profiled literally millions of Reddit users. One of Bardfinn's known targets was the extremely popular /r/The_Donald subreddit, a subreddit with millions of users. Bardfinn's data-mining of that subreddit - as part of his campaign to have it suspended - makes it much more likely that he has data-mined millions of redditors and not just 30,000 like he claims above.
When asked to disclose which populations of redditors Bardfinn is currently data-mining, Bardfinn deceptively only lists right wingers and conspiracy nuts, and neglects to mention the fact that he's also data-mining feminists, gamers, shitposters and literally anyone on Reddit that doesn't submit to SJW cult dogma:
One of my projects is cataloguing and cross-checking the users of hate subreddits. This helps identify when those users re-constitute in another subreddit and repurpose it. It also helps identify their "side projects" and the groups they're allying with.
Also -- in case anyone hasn't heard -- the maintainer of MassTagger has launched a Patreon to help improve the MassTagger project.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/dax2lf/several_white_nationalists_subreddits_have_been/f1w2ks8/ BU: http://archive.is/24csr
This statement "cataloguing and cross-checking the users of hate subreddits" is deliberately termed to be vague. Any subreddit can be declared a hate subreddit if Bardfinn and AHS deem it so. Also remember that, according to Bardfinn & AHS, merely participating in a wrongthink subreddit is reason enough for inclusion in his wrongthinkers blacklist. Bardfinn makes no distinction between active participants, opponents, occasional posters. They are all "white supremacist neo-nazis" in his eyes, and all deserve to be targeted and profiled.
Here's Bardfinn threatening to tag redditors in Masstagger for merely participating in wrongthink subreddits, regardless of their intent for doing so:
Furthermore: There are several research efforts and moderation-assistance tools that use the public record of participation in a subreddit in order to identify and track bigots. If you engage bigots in their controlled spaces, in their hate subreddits - at best you're simply getting your account recorded and flagged by such utilities as MassTagger; at worst you're introducing noise into the efforts of anti-hatred activists and Reddit's AEO division in actioning bigots and removing their accounts and content from the platform, and adding work for the thousands of moderators sitewide who rely on these tools and early-warning systems to triage moderation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/masstagger/comments/hw4nmg/so_ive_been_banned_from_a_leftwing_sub_because_a/g1ccyjj/
MassTagger was never designed to provide judgements. It was designed to help you discover evidence of bad faith and bigotry, where that evidence was most likely to exist - so you can decide for yourself.
The flaw is this: People have not yet learned the wisdom in Do Not Feed The Trolls! Boycott Hate; Don't Participate! Don't comment, subscribe, vote, or otherwise amplify / assist the bigots.
https://www.reddit.com/r/masstagger/comments/hw4nmg/so_ive_been_banned_from_a_leftwing_sub_because_a/g1ab760/
Here's another comment from Bardfinn where he deceptively discloses only a small portion of the redditors he data-mines on Reddit, while eventually disclosing that the actual group he targets is much larger than the three he details here:
So far, there's three general populations I'm cataloguing --
There's the "Channer" sadist-sociopath ecosystem -- users from Cringeanarchy / iFunny / Bruhfunny / the chans. They have a tendency to create a large amount of "backup subreddits" -- and populate them with different accounts as moderators. These accounts are generally rarely used, or not used at all, and the subreddits are rarely used, or not used at all, until the previous subreddit/accounts get banned. They concentrate in one subreddit, and go out and participate in other subreddits as "whips" -- to exacerbate Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, and bigotry, and shout down / call in backup to badger and chase away anyone that violates the echo chamber.
There's the "Hoo-ah"s -- the ShitPoliticsSays / /r/Conservative / /r/Conservatives ecosystem. They actually try to moderate their subreddits according to the Reddit Content Policy, are ignored (for the most part) by the Channers, but go out to T_D and to the rest of Reddit and vomit up Fox News talking points.
And there's the QAnon types -- the ones that are down the rabbit hole. Trump True Believers. They don't have public subreddits (outside of T_D). They don't have a core group identity on Reddit, outside of T_D. They've been radicalised by QAnon material on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere.
There's a "fourth" group, the sockpuppets -- the amount of sockpuppets in the hoo-ahs tends to be lowest; Each of the Channer types generally has 3-5 alt accounts. I haven't tried to analyse whether there's alt accounts on T_D -- that's a bygone conclusion, and because there's no automated access to the posts and comments of quarantined subreddits, I don't have data regarding how much of T_D is sockpuppets.
But I do know that approximately 10% of the comment activity on T_D, taken from a large set of samples, is from the Channer ecosystem on Reddit (the aforementioned "whips"), approximately 4% is the "hoo-ahs", and about 3% is flagged white supremacist accounts. That makes about 15%.
The remainder of the activity on T_D that I've been cataloguing has been accounts that I can only suppose are QAnon accounts, sockpuppets being used to inflate the numbers, etcetera.
Every sample of 1000 comments I take from T_D, there's 150-200 accounts participating that I've never tagged before.
I also end up tracking white supremacists and the known alt-right, just because of the high amount of cross-pollination from the "Channer" core users.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/dax2lf/several_white_nationalists_subreddits_have_been/f1w85ly/
"So far, there's three general populations I'm cataloguing", but his own conclusion to the above post belies this claim of only targeting three populations, because at the very end of the Bardfinn admits that he's also data-mining and profiling "white supremacists and the known alt-right" which is literally anyone who doesn't agree with SJW cult dogma. Why is he trying to make it seem like he's merely hunting down channer trolls on the site, while deliberately hiding the fact that he targets literally anyone who appears to be anti-SJW, including liberals and leftists who refuse to go along with the SJW cult? Why is he getting shy about the true extent of his political profiling?
The assumption that Bardfinn's wrongthinker blacklist is very likely much much larger than he openly admits, is corroborated by Masstagger developer Nathan Beam's posts on /r/Masstagger where Nathan openly admitted that more than 2 million redditors are now politically profiled in Masstagger as "white supremacist neo-nazis". In this thread on /r/Masstagger's Nathan Beam claimed that he and his 35,000 Masstagger users have now tagged over a million Reddit users as far right extremists; most of these users completely unaware that this has even happened to them and they have been stigmatized behind their backs:
https://www.reddit.com/r/masstagger/comments/ddhl19/thats_a_lotta_data/
BU: http://archive.is/pe4xy
(NOTE: In this post it was "one million and counting", it's safe to assume it's over 2 million entries by now.)
Where did these 2 million+ redditor accounts in the Masstagger blacklist come from? Nathan Beam claims that 35,000 active Masstagger users together have tagged these millions of Redditors. However, it is much more likely that for a large part these wrongthinker entries in Masstagger came from Bardfinn himself.
Why is Bardfinn downplay the number of people he has politically profiled on Reddit? Because he probably knows that politically profiling millions of people behind their backs while accusing them of being "white supremacist neo-nazis" for simply participating in a certain subreddit is not only blatantly defamatory but a violation of their reasonable presumption of online privacy in many jurisdictions. Bardfinn is trying to make it seem like he's being specific in targeting only certain redditors, when it's pretty obvious he's casting as wide a net as possible.
Bardfinn's recent rant, where he urged Reddit to use wrongthink subreddits as honey-pots in order to ban not just the subreddits themselves but all their participants as well, shows that he's not being specific or proportional.
Bardfinn keeps talking about wanting to do something with the information he has data-mined from the Reddit API. I don't know what he's referring to but this strengthens my suspicion that he intends to cash in on his mass data-mining of hapless redditors. If you have watched the recently released Shadowgate documentary, you might recall there was a shilling scene in that film about social media user profiles being sold on the black market. Not saying Bardfinn will resort to doing that... but would you be surprised if he did?
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