Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

DeSantis transforms Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

I really should read my own blog.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

You are here: Home / Taking off his turban they said “is this man a Jew?”

Taking off his turban they said “is this man a Jew?”

by | 136 Comments

This post is in: 

This proves that Antifa are the real problem:

Want to market Nazi memorabilia, or recruit marchers for a far-right rally? Facebook’s self-service ad-buying platform had the right audience for you.

Until this week, when we asked Facebook about it, the world’s largest social network enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” or, “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.’”

To test if these ad categories were real, we paid $30 to target those groups with three “promoted posts” — in which a ProPublica article or post was displayed in their news feeds. Facebook approved all three ads within 15 minutes.

Facebook has since disabled this, but I bet you still can do similar things to target racists and Islamophobes.

Reader Interactions

136Comments

  5. 5.

    dmsilev

    Facebook’s automated system suggested “Second Amendment” as an additional category that would boost our audience size to 119,000 people, presumably because its system had correlated gun enthusiasts with anti-Semites.

    I’m shocked. No, wait, I’m not.

  9. 9.

    germy

    more leaks to the new yawk times:

    The president’s outburst came in the middle of an Oval Office meeting Mr. Trump had with top advisers on May 17, to discuss candidates to take over the F.B.I. after the president fired its director, James B. Comey, earlier that month. In addition to Mr. Sessions, Vice President Mike Pence, Donald F. McGahn III, the White House counsel, and several other aides attended the meeting.

    Eight years of President Obama, I never saw the word “outburst” used in a sentence about him. Not once.

  11. 11.

    TenguPhule

    @germy:

    In addition to Mr. Sessions, Vice President Mike Pence, Donald F. McGahn III, the White House counsel, and several other aides attended the meeting.

    Surprised this didn’t leak earlier, given that distinguished audience.

  12. 12.

    Major Major Major Major

    Contacted about the anti-Semitic ad categories by ProPublica, Facebook removed them, explaining that they had been generated algorithmically. The company added that it would explore ways to prevent similarly offensive ad targeting categories from appearing in the future.

    Yet when Slate tried something similar Thursday, our ad targeting “Kill Muslimic Radicals,” “Ku-Klux-Klan,” and more than a dozen other plainly hateful groups was similarly approved. In our case, it took Facebook’s system just one minute to give the green light.

  13. 13.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @Baud:
    I posted a New Yorker article on AH.com and I got kicked for a week for it:

    Goku, you have been kicked for a week in response to your message It’s Time for Hillary Clinton to Gracefully Bow Out of Public Life, Along with All Other Women /s. During this time you will be unable to post.

    https://www.newyorker.com/humor/dai…ong-with-all-other-women?mbid=social_facebook
    /s for safety
    Wow. Yet another “people who like Sanders/don’t like Clinton are sexist” thing. With no logic or evidence. And you’ve even got a whole thread for it.

    Kicked for a week for trolling and unsubstantiated accusations of sexism.

    All I did was post an article in the Chat section! I wasn’t accusing anyone of sexism. One can certainly dislike HRC without being a woman-hater. I made it clear in that thread that I was only talking about a fringe minority of Sanders supporters.

  16. 16.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @Baud:
    Alternatehistory.com, abbreviated. The admin there kicked me for, imo, ridiculous reasons. He was reaching with the rules. I wasn’t the only one who got kicked either. I even PM’d him almost two days ago contesting the kick. No response. Not too happy right now. They even have a Hall of Infamy thread in the Chat section that reports people who have been kicked/banned. I couldn’t even speak up in my own defense. It is what is I guess.

  28. 28.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @Baud: ?. No, it’s counterfactual history. Like asking what if the British won the American Revolutionary War. It’s a forum where people can discuss alternate outcomes of historical events. Many even extrapolate timelines out of single changes to history. Trust me it’s not what you’re thinking.

  30. 30.

    TenguPhule

    Speaking of Assholes. Here’s Michael Gerson.

    Consider the shockingly shabby treatment recently accorded by some Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to Amy Coney Barrett, a law professor at Notre Dame Law School who is being considered for a position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. Her questioners displayed a confusion of the intellect so profound, a disregard for constitutional values so reckless, that it amounts to anti-religious bigotry.

    Barrett is an instructive test case of secular, liberal unease with earnest faith, particularly in its Catholic variety.

    Whatever her other failures, DiFi got this one right.

    It fell to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), however, to explicitly declare Barrett part of a suspect class. “Dogma and law are two different things,” Feinstein lectured. “And I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. . . . When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you. And that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for for years in this country.” Translation: Don’t let your dogma mess with my dogma.

    Where to start? How about with the fact that Feinstein’s line of questioning was itself a violation of the Constitution? Here is constitutional scholar and Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber: “By prohibiting religious tests, the Constitution makes it impermissible to deny any person a national, state or local office on the basis of their religious convictions or lack thereof. Because religious belief is constitutionally irrelevant to the qualifications for a federal judgeship, the Senate should not interrogate any nominee about those beliefs. I believe, more specifically, that the questions directed to professor Barrett about her faith were not consistent with the principle set forth in the Constitution’s ‘no religious test’ clause.”

    The day Mr. Mushroom Cloud shuffles off will be a day to be celebrated.

  31. 31.

    Adam L Silverman

    @dmsilev: Go read the comments sections at the world’s largest firearms blog. The owner/publisher is Jewish American. His parents are Holocaust survivors. A number of his regular writers and editors are Jewish Americans as well. The comments section, especially on the clickbaity articles, quickly devolve into a sewer.

  34. 34.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @chopper:

    ♩ ♪ Working for the trump clown ♩ ♪

    Goin’ down, down
    ♩ ♪ Working for the trump clown ♩ ♪
    Whew! About to slip down

  35. 35.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @Dolly Llama: I only joined last week. I’d link to the thread in question but only registered members can see the Chat forum. I was shocked because I had read the Forum Rules before even posting and didn’t think I had done anything wrong. I still don’t. And no this doesn’t happen to me a lot.

  45. 45.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @Baud: @TenguPhule:
    The Chat forum is specifically for topics like politics. That’s what mostly comes up there in that subforum anyway.

  47. 47.

    Starfish

    @Baud: I think I like your new campaign slogan. “they done you wrong and thus are my enemy.” But I guess you lost the grammar pedants. Win some. Lose some.

  50. 50.

    TenguPhule

    House backs $1.2T spending bill with more money for military

    The vote was 211-198 for the massive measure that wrapped the 12 annual spending bills into one in advance of the end of the budget year on Sept. 30. Even though the Senate still must act, the government will keep operating through Dec. 8, thanks to legislation Congress passed last week and sent to Trump.

    House members spent the past two weeks debating the measure’s $500 billion for domestic agencies. GOP leaders then merged that domestic spending package with an earlier House measure that would give record budget increases to the Pentagon and provide a $1.6 billion down payment for Trump’s wall along the U.S.-Mexico border that he repeatedly has insisted Mexico would finance.

    “It does everything from strengthening our national defense and veterans’ programs to cracking down on illegal immigration to protecting life to cutting abusive Washington agencies like the IRS and the EPA,” said the No. 2 House Republican, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California. Speaker Paul Ryan. R-Wis., praised a pay raise for the military, border security funding, and “defunding” Planned Parenthood as victories for Republicans and Trump.

    Somehow I don’t see this passing any time soon through the Senate.

  52. 52.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Starfish: Careful, we’ll wind up with that LGF commenter who went off the rails when he adopted a new nym, avatar, and persona and he’ll show up and start posting links to Star Trek Voyager clips in the comments thread.

  62. 62.

    Davebo

    I have a hard time getting to peeved at FB over this. It’s not like they had a team compiling Nazi’s to allow advertisers to target them and they did resolve it.

    Hopefully they’ll have humans approve these things going forward but I can also see that not going well!

  65. 65.

    NotMax

    @Adam L. Silverman

    How Voyager made it through any crisis while having an obviously ‘graduated at the bottom of his class at Star Fleet security school’ officer assigned aboard remains a puzzlement.

  66. 66.

    Corner Stone

    Chris Hayes should just turn his show over to 30 minutes of Bernie and then 30 minutes of Michael Moore.

  67. 67.

    Mike J

    I thought from the Clampdown lyric this was going to be about the Jewish woman who was assaulted because an asshole thought she was Muslim.

  68. 68.

    mai naem mobile

    Is there some reason FEMA couldn’t get a boatload of fucking tarps to St Thomas on Monday. Is there some reason why there weren’t some there already? Not trying to do a hindsight 20/20 but tarps sounds like a requirement for hurricane survivors. Really any natural disasters where housing is destroyed .

  71. 71.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Corner Stone: don’t forget Mo Brooks, Dan Donovan* and a couple other goober congressmen he has a strange affinity for

    unless the ones I named are the tribute he pays Andy Lack so he can have the ones you did

    * added cause it took me a minute to remember the name of the Staten Island goober

  74. 74.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @Dolly Llama:
    @Baud:
    Thanks for the support, both of you.

    @Adam L Silverman: Ha! They thought I was making accusations of sexism at people, when I really wasn’t. Apparently, over there, you have to multiple citations for evidence of a claim, even if it’s common knowledge, like some Berners and other anti-Hillary assholes being misogynist.

  80. 80.

    Steve in the ATL

    @TenguPhule

    Baud 2020: Enraging grammar pedants everywhere!

    I was avoiding posting this on the previous thread, but if the door to grammar pedantry has been opened:

    Racism=I think black people are inferior to white people

    Prejudice=I don’t like black people

    Related and often seen in tandem, but still two different things.

    And now back to your regularly scheduled posting.

  84. 84.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @NotMax:
    You want an example of a comment worthy of kick from that place? Take a look (not my comment):

    Poster 1:

    I don’t like the implication that if someone wants this failed candidate who couldn’t even defeat the orange clown who bragged about his sexual assaults on live television gone, that implies they are sexists. As if there was really no other reason to dislike HRC. The author’s just a sore loser, that’s all.

    Poster 2:
    Not for nothing, but there were extremely strong sexist undertones in the anti-Hillary movements that often held her to a double standard or conflated her with Bill. Denying that sexism played a big part in anti-Hillary approaches is just naive. It would be absurd to say everyone who dislikes Hillary Clinton is sexist, of course.

    Admin’s response in response to Poster 2:

    You cannot say crap like that on this site, smearing a huge portion of its members, without evidence.

    You’re kicked for a week for unsubstantiated accusations of sexism.

  88. 88.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @Steve in the ATL:
    In a chat forum, that is supposed to be a little more laid back? I’ve seen a little evidence that the rule isn’t always applied evenly. You can talk bad Nazis (alt-reichers). I was apparently never reported for that one.

  91. 91.

    efgoldman

    On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons go to physical therapy. Results have been excellent, but te therapist beats the crap out of me.
    I’ve also started driving myself for the first time since I was in the hospital, end of July.
    Today when I drove home, it felt a bit weird. Also was more difficult than it should have been to get in and out of the barber chair and to go up the three steps into the house.
    When I got home, I realized that he never took the 2-1/2 lb ankle weights back.

  94. 94.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
    Which was a real shame too, being the first female captain who was the star. I’m just finishing up the first season of DS9, right now. I like what I’ve seen so far. A big change from TNG where it seemed like everyone in Starfleet was human when they have like a hundred member worlds in the Federation. The Kira character I think was a reboot of Denise Crosby’ s character from Season 1 of TNG. She’s written better and can act to boot.

  102. 102.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @Major Major Major Major:
    That’s the sad thing. The forum has a left-leaning culture there. I thought everyone would get a good laugh out of it, maybe have a discussion, which we did. Not get kicked for a week.

  107. 107.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @Major Major Major Major:
    Are you saying I’m crazy? ?
    Eh, I’ll probably just stick to the on-topic forums (actual alt-history subforums) more and just be more careful in what I say once my kick is up.

  108. 108.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    I’ve mostly only ever lurked on AH.com, and not at all in a long time, but my experience is that on many message boards, the staff cause many of the problems the communities face, and the larger the site, the more this seems to hold true. This certainly looks like an example of that. It’s utterly beyond me how any of the excerpts posted here qualify as “smearing a huge portion of [the site’s] members”. Saying “A lot of Bernie Bros are sexist” doesn’t constitute an attack on anyone at the site who supported Bernie, because it doesn’t cite anyone at the site as a Bernie Bro (nor does it even place them among the sexist Bernie Bros).

    The communities I post at these days generally maintain a hands-off approach to community management. I used to moderate some communities that had much more intricate approaches to moderation, and I don’t miss it. 90% of the time people were just developing post hoc rationalisations for what they wanted done and twisting the rules to do so. That definitely looks like the case here.

  111. 111.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @Major Major Major Major: indeed. This has been a key factor in convincing me that the whole idea of hierarchy is suspect, as was the realisation that I was just as much a dick as any other rando when given power. Obviously there are necessary hierarchies (parent/child, teacher/student, etc.) but overall the whole idea of authority is probably best viewed with intrinsic suspicion.

  115. 115.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @Major Major Major Major: I don’t object to being classified as one, though I suspect most anarchists would object to classifying me as one because I’m also enough of a pragmatist that I don’t ever expect government to go away. My view on it is roughly what Le Guin’s is in The Dispossessed: we’ll probably always have something that qualifies as a de facto government, even if it doesn’t actually call itself one.

    In any case, I’d like to see a society in which government weren’t necessary, but I doubt I’ll live to see it. Anarchism is s major influence on my thought, but for practical purposes, I’m probably best categorised as a libertarian socialist.

  120. 120.

    Adam L Silverman

    @NotMax: Ookla was my cousin Phil’s first major role. You have no idea how hard it was for a Sausquatch to get work in Hollywood in the 1980s.

  126. 126.

    Adam L Silverman

    @SFBayAreaGal: It is mine as well. I do like Voyager, but I also understand why people don’t. And I’m one of the few who by and large am okay with Enterprise. Especially season 3 once they got away from episodic and moved to arcs. Though the finale was meh.

  130. 130.

    efgoldman

    @? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:

    I’ll probably just stick to the on-topic forums (actual alt-history subforums) more and just be more careful in what I say once my kick is up

    Somebody else, ArchTeryx maybe, spent comment after comment complaining about treatment he received at LG&M. Just like you, s/he was talking to an audience that could not and would not do anything about it. Enough already

  133. 133.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @Boat Person:
    I thought I heard something about that. What sucks is that AH.com is pretty much the only major alt-history site on the internet.
    @efgoldman:
    I’ve had good experiences the otherwise if this happens many times again I’ll consider walking away.

Comments are closed.