Talk:Megan Squire

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Information from Dr Squire's elon.edu staff page

Her staff page (Wayback Machine link, formerly https://facstaff.elon.edu/msquire) includes many suggested references that use her work.

Meet Antifa's Secret Weapon Against Far-Right Extremists

A left-wing activist release names, addresses, emails, passwords, and payment records for >4800 members of the League of the South
Squire verified the data and found a list to investigate
Squire named the database 'Whack-a-Mole'
the database may be the largest on far-right extremists
Squire coordinated with an SPLC analyst
Squire sent information back to the left-wing activist
45 years old (Jan 2018)
lives in a suburban area
has a husband, daughter, two step-children, two pets
Whack-a-Mole monitors 400k white nationalist accounts on Facebook and other sites
'antifa' activists are among her strongest supporters
Squire herself is peaceful
"But she is sympathetic to antifa’s goal of silencing racist extremists and is unwilling to condemn their use of violence, describing it as the last resort of a 'diversity of tactics.'"
within three weeks, the SPLC began acting on information given by Squire
the SPLC contacted 130 individuals prior to taking legal action, providing a chance to respond
grew up near Virginia Beach
from a conservative Christian family
At age 15, she went with her high school environmental club to protest an industrial pig farm's polluting behavior
at William & Mary, got degrees in art history and public policy
took a job at an antivirus company as a secretary after becoming interested in computers
PhD at Nova Southeaster University in Florida
got a job at a startup in North Carolina
later got a teaching job at Elon
While teaching, protested the Iraq War
campaigned for Obama in 2008
Squire feels that Obama failed to deliver on his promises, especially in his response to the Great Recession
developed disillusionment regarding electoral politics
got involved with the Occupy movement, by later found its utopianism inadequate to generate results
voted Jill Stein in 2016
After the Trump 2016 campaign and harassment of a local mosque by a neo-Confederate group, Squire scraped the hate group's Facebook page for information. Reported the information to the SPLC and the NC Department of the Secretary of State
During 2017, began tracking groups outside NC
reported the Charlottesville protest to the SPLC prior to the event
protested against the Charlottesville folks
narrowly avoided the car at the Charlottesville car attack
Whack-a-Mole is the first rigorous database of white nationalist details
it also serves as an archive because a lot of alt-right information is only temporarily placed on the web
Squire has been doxxed before, receiving death threats and calls for firing from Elon. Confederate flags ahve been placed on her yard
following Charlottesville, Squire considered releasing Whack-a-Mole publicly. She decided not to do so
Squire compares her work to that of a "fusion centre," integrating intelligence from a variety of sources and handing it off to actors

Jlevi (talk) 02:07, 28 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Additional sources

Here’s How Anti-Muslim Groups On Facebook Overlap With A Range Of Far-Right Extremism

Squire found more intense hatred in Facebook groups than expected
she's a professor in computer science at Elon University
she has a research paper titled "Network Analysis of Anti-Muslim Groups on Facebook"
the paper was to be presented in September 2018 at the St. Petersburg Social Informatics conference
for the paper, she used data from hundreds of far-right Fcebook groups over ten months
she mapped connections between these groups
Squire found a huge number of such groups
she also found that the groups work as a "common denominator" with other extreme ideologies
she argues that some of these groups act as "central players in the hate network as a whole"
she used Facebook's Graph API
she got a dataset of 700000 members from 1870 open and closed groups from a wide range of ideologies
she used the SPLC to categorize the groups and narrow her search space
she found that Facebook members of one group tended to be members of multiple.
P(in anti-Muslim group|in anti-immigrant group AND "multi-issue" user) = 61%
P(in anti-Muslim group|in anti-government group AND "multi-issue" user) = 44%
P(in anti-Muslim group|in white nationalist group AND "multi-issue" user) = 37%
P(in anti-Muslim group|in neo-Confederate group AND "multi-issue" user) = 35%
some of the anti-Muslim groups had thousands of members
names included "Americans Against Mosques" and "Burn a Quran Stop Islam"
Facebook disallows calling groups of people "filth," according to its hate speech rules
however, "Veterans Against Islamic Filth" had 2700 members until Facebook banned the group after Buzzfeed asked about it for the story
Squire used only publicly available information
in an interview with Recode, Zuckerberg said he would not ban Holocaust deniers from his platform
Facebook kept Infowars on the platform following Sandy Hook and 9/11 conspiracy theories. They've been criticized for that
Madihha Ahussain of the group Muslim Advocates argues that Facebook doesn't take anti-Muslim sentiment seriously
Facebook says it removed 2.5 million cases of hate speech in the first quarter of 2018

Jlevi (talk) 23:21, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

2,200 Viewed Germany Shooting Before Twitch Removed Post

Squire analyzed Telegram viewing levels
Squire monitors channels on Telegram
Squire operated as an expert for the NYT

Jlevi (talk) 22:38, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback from New Page Review process

I left the following feedback for the creator/future reviewers while reviewing this article: Nice work / good start!.

North8000 (talk) 00:00, 7 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Unable to find a source for the statement "has […] denied that his members pay dues"…

…other than the already-cited USA Today article, so I've added {{Says who}} to that statement. I made a more-than-cursory attempt, with several different web searches, scanning the existing Proud Boys Wikipedia article, and I couldn't find anything robust enough not to have to take the USA Today writer at their word. My guess is the USA Today writer considered that noteworthy at the time the article was written because of the organization's having been being classified by the Canadian government as a terrorist group that same February (see also Proud Boys § Canada).

Many results in a straight-up web search for terms like "proud boys leader enrique tarrio denies that his members pay dues" turn up news articles court documents which seem to accept dues-paying as a known fact, now, some years later. Please add a better source if you can find one. Ernstkm (talk) 14:55, 28 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]