‘Skittles’ Among New Slurs Used by Censor-Dodging Racists Online

Racists and bigots are turning to a new coded language to bypass automatic censors implemented by online giants like Google, Twitter and Facebook.

Twitter, for example, employs artificial intelligence, or AI, to detect trends in certain word pairings and learn when hate speech is being spread on its platform — as well as identify the perpetrators.

Because languages and slurs are constantly evolving, simply giving the AI a list of pre-established pejoratives can leave it unable to perform its task as time goes on.

A coordinated action, spurred on largely by 4chan users’ so-called “Operation Google,” aims to get around these learning programs and attempts to trick them into censoring otherwise benign terms.

Many of the expressions come from company names — such as “Google,” to derogatorily describe black people and “Skype” to refer to Jewish individuals. Other coded slurs include “Yahoo” for Mexicans and “Bing” for Chinese people.

Perhaps the most intriguing “innovation” is the use of “Skittle” to describe Arabs or Muslims — almost certainly inspired by the now-infamous meme shared by Donald Trump Jr.,  in which he compared Muslim immigrants to a bowl of candy. The image has since been removed due to copyright issues.

His highly erroneous argument implied that no rational person would eat Skittles if a few were known to be poisonous.

But as “Operation Google” demonstrates, Trump Jr.’s racist notions are far more toxic — he has helped give birth to a new racial slur.

4chan is the digital cesspool responsible for orchestrating and perpetuating the “Gamergate” debacle last year. Gamergate was a pseudo-scandal that erupted online following men’s rights activist claims that a female video game developer, Zoe Quinn, used her relationship with a game journalist to receive a positive review of her latest game.

It was later revealed that this faux outrage was drummed up by 4chan users — but not before Quinn and a handful of other women in the video game industry had been inundated with vicious threats.

At one point, following police recommendation, several women and their families had to flee their homes after their personal information was distributed publicly for every angry Gamergate supporter to see.

4chan’s latest campaign will hopefully be stopped in its tracks before eliciting the destruction Gamergate did.

Sadly, at the time of writing, 4chan users have already taken to social media platforms following instructions to use the coded slurs in ways that are “as venomous as possible so they definitely get triggered” by AI programs.

This call to action has inundated minority users of Facebook and Twitter with messages like “stupid Googles” and disturbing memes, including one showing a lynched black man hanging from a tree with the caption “Google Hangout.”

Unfortunately, this campaign has proved its point to a degree: AI-based censorship of hate speech can be tricked and evaded.

Perhaps Google’s Jigsaw division will cook up something capable of nullifying these tactics one day, but in the mean time, this issue seems most easily remedied by using old-fashioned human moderators.

The people participating in “Operation Google” claim they are fighting against progressive oppression that impinges on their free speech. But in reality, they are cowards who know their poisonous world views can only be expressed from behind a computer screen.

These individuals may believe being unable to spew hate speech is an unfair form of censorship. In truth, however, they are grossly out of step with the rest of the country. “Operation Google” supporters appear to long for the days when basic rights were only awarded to straight, white men.

Is this what Donald Trump’s campaign means by “make America great again”?

Photo Credit: David Adam Kess / Wikipedia Commons