Talk:Megan Squire

Untitled
Her staff page 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)

Elon Bio bio

Timothy Wilson Planned to Bomb Hospital During COVID-19 Crisis: FBI

her Salon article

Her articles at Elon

articles at The Conversation

FBI: Terrorism suspect who planned to bomb hospital visited neo-Nazi chatrooms

Once Ardent Trump Supporters, White Nationalists Splinter Ahead of Presidential Vote

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)

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)

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)