What kind of neighborhood watch has "Junior Inquisitors"?
Good news! A UK Law Student calling himself
"The Witchfinder General" has tried unsuccessfully to construct a bot net designed to automate the brigading and harassment process. The app was created as a response to automatic block list tools, which "The General Witchfinder" believe infringe upon his right to free expression.
Thankfully, the Witch Finder's app is unlikely to ever get approval on Twitter, probably because it is a botnet designed to overwhelm their reporting system with bullshit reports and/or impersonate subscribers. Details about the project, including its MS Paint logo follow beneath the fold.
In a later post, the General Witchfinder proposed that his electric domino could use subscribed accounts as mouthpieces to Tweet pre-written messages.
The app's proposed functions included automatic abuse of Twitter's report system and an automatic mouthpiece to abuse targets.
When all of this proved to be in violation of Twitter's ToS the Witchfinder claimed the application was a parody.
That rings a little false, seeing as the Witchfinder wrote some pretty Orwellian code to describe what exactly the tools would do. He even offered to have "a private proof of concept test for some like minded souls" to help gin up interest in an Automatic Witch Finder app.
Telling: In the proof of concept code for his parody, "targets" "identified by the community as anti-social" have a "Crowdsourced Alert" issued against them by subscriber accounts, who give the robot their name and password.
Thankfully, the Witch Finder app is a lemon. The bot's Twitter account is controlled by the Witchfinder himself, and the Tweets it posts are written by him. To date it's run one analysis, also on himself. This proof-of-concept exercise found that the Witchfinder was in "compliance". Of what, I'm not 100% sure.
After seven minutes and nearly 9,000 Tweets, the app determined the Witchfinder is not himself a witch.
At press time, the Witchfinder commented that this project "never existed", and repeated that the Twitter Account he registered for it was a "parody".
The account for the Big Friendly Hat stated 'This is a parody account' as required by Twitter rules for parody accounts since it was created on 22/03/2015. Since the application has never existed, sent any tweets or reported anyone for anything it has never violated Twitter Terms of Service or any laws.