Talk:Megan Squire

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)

Additional sources

• 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)

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)