Potential terrorists can be identified from social media posts | Hacker News Reader

Potential terrorists can be identified from social media posts

phys.org

17 pointsPaulHoule24 comments

What about on far left forums? Can it do those too?

Something like this is sure to come with tons of false positives.

Ought to. They said that potential terrorists talk about terrorism, not ideology. The peaceful left- and right-wingers talk about left- and right-wing ideology but the “potential terrorists” are talking about ways and means.

Yeah, but most people talking about "ways and means" aren't planning anything, don't execute any plan, they're just being edgelords or spitballing hypotheticals or teasing the (probably nonexistent) feds that are watching them. For every actual terrorist put on some type of watchlist there are bound to be thousands of edgy teenagers that are on that list for goofing around. That doesn't even speak to the fact that such a tool will be used to go after people simply criticizing their government for it's heavy handed authoritarian activities.

Anyway, my point with the above comment was to poke fun at the article's extreme emphasis on the right wing aspect as opposed to the terrorist aspect. Extremists of all stripes engage in extreme behavior.

The last left-wing group that I think people were really afraid of in the US was the thoroughly unhinged

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbionese_Liberation_Army

which leaves me wondering how much deadlier bullets really can be if you lace them with cyanide. See

https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/comparison-political-v...

which says

   Across both datasets, we find that radical acts perpetrated by individuals associated 
   with left-wing causes are less likely to be violent. In the United States, 
   we find no difference between the level of violence perpetrated by right-wing    
   and Islamist extremists. However, differences in violence emerge on the  
   global level, with Islamist extremists being more likely than right-wing 
   extremists to engage in more violent acts.

The stereotype of the violent extremist in the US is ideologically confused: they find they had a copy of The Communist Manifesto in their room but drove their neighbors crazy listening to Rush (the Canadian band) at 3am.

I'm not sure I understand what youre trying to say.

If you're on social media then you're a potential terrorist. It's not a hard problem.

Terrorists hate this one weird trick!

I mean, if that’s what it takes to push people back on personal websites and private small forums I’m all for it :)

we could find ourselves walking straight into Orwell's darkest nightmare. we need to make sure we’re not trading away our freedoms for a false sense of security.

I'm curious to what degree TikTok could be used to detect precrime.

Once a person turns 18, he must pass through The Video Room. After he swipes through videos for an hour, investigators can predict his cognitive, sexual, and criminal future. He gets sorted from there.

Assume a likely future of increased crime and weakened human rights laws. And assume likely future advances in recommendation algorithms, auto-generated material, pupil dilation trackers, heart rate and skin temperature monitors, etc.

This is possible now. What's stopping it from being widely used? How many checks and balances are we away from this?

You can also see domestic abuse on the immo market. If all units around a unit flicker fast , dissapear, reappear, shit is going down.

What does this mean?

Everyone I don’t like is a potential terrorist.

Where would the oversight come from when tuning the thresholds on this model?

I’ve seen this movie!

Obviously it also includes anyone who criticizes the power of the state and the status quo. I think we've been unironically in the intersection of 1984, Brave New World, socialism and communism, for the past decade. Just like when you are in the middle of a storm you don't realize how bad it is until you are looking at it from the outside, people will see how much of a dystopia this is in a few decades.

“In a few decades” assumes we gain the perspective to see the storm from the outside, to use your analogy. I certainly hope we gain that perspective and are able to learn from our mistakes until we make them again when the pendulum swings once again.

Whoa, workers have controlled the means of production for the past decade? Awesome!

Just as much as they did under communism.

It's not the only form of communism. At it's core it's about seeing the world through lens of oppressor vs. oppressed. Class communism was about owners and workers, but now it's more about race and gender.

Walking out with a phone? Everybody knows where you had been for the entire year with a precision of minutes.

Walking out with a covered assault riffle? nobody can know the position of a shooter; in what roof they climb, how much closer to the president they are, or in what class of the school that weapon is currently located. Is as ridiculous as that.

In a world when your car, TV, even your toaster, is calling home; the war weapons shouldn't have the right to remain occult to the police. Not unless they are being used on a real war. Acting in that area seems more efficient than spy every frustrated adolescent on internet.

This would work assuming the governing and policing system is to be trusted. The reason fire arms purchased with the intent for self defense already demonstrates you don’t.

Not to mention the possibility someone dupes a firearms ID and negates the system.

The idea that you need to buy a fire weapon to self defense against hypothetical encounter with a bad policeman is plain stupid. Do you know what really could help for self-defense against police? A good lawyer. A pistol will just grant that you will die like a dog for no reason.

So after the hypothetical policeman is done doing some hypothetical wrong doing ( assault and the other one ) then I should call my lawyer? There’s more than just the scenario of a policeman writing a ticket that I can dispute with the judge.

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