WhiteDate and several other "White" sites scraped for data

Politics & Elections
1

A person going by “Martha Root” has collected 100GB of data from several white supremacist type connection sites. Many of the personal profiles are posted on a website, though not quite in full, but the collected data is hosted by DDoSecrets (not sure how publically accessible it is).

I have mixed feelings about this. The victims are not people that I have sympathy for, though some of them may be sort of innocuous or were dragged into signing up. Most of what I see hackerz doing seems to have a certain appeal to me. So far. But I worry some about when they might hit people I support.

Does "White Culture" Exist?
Does "White Culture" Exist?
Does "White Culture" Exist?
2

It seems to me that a profile on a dating site was never secret to begin with. That’s information that you choose to deliberately put out there so that people can find you and learn certain pieces of information about you. If you choose to tell the world “I’m a racist who only wants to date other racists”, that’ll increase your chance of finding the sort of romantic partner you want, but, well, you’re still telling that to the world.

3

Here is the data that was scraped

  • Over 8,000 user profiles
  • Profile photos, bios, and declared beliefs
  • Internal communications and admin-level data
  • Information possibly linking users to other accounts
  • Metadata from uploaded images, some containing GPS coordinates.

The first two are certainly fair game, in my opinion. The rest is iffy. That said, fuck those people.

4

OK, that one is definitely problematic, due to the “possibly”. I think we can probably agree with “fuck those people”, but what about people who aren’t “those people”? Like, what if I’m not a racist jerk, but something about my account on Facebook happens to look vaguely similar to something from one of these profiles?

5

Let’s say there is a Trump administration official there who has advocated color-blind policies. I suppose it is in the public interest to out that.

But I do not generally think this sort of thing is going to help move us in the right direction.

6

A Trump official advocating what now?

7

There are all sorts of potential problems. Like what if someone made a fake account to honeytrap and out those assholes or just to troll them? What if someone used someone else’s pictures on a fake account to prank them or set them up?

8

The terminology might have changed over time, but hasn’t same-race preference in dating always been a thing? In the classifieds days, terms like “SWF” (single white female) were common, and there were movies and novels about it too.

An old OkCupid study from before they were acquired by Match Group did some racial analyses and found that most women preferred their own race: https://web.archive.org/web/20150129203012/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/race-attraction-2009-2014/ and that Asian and Black men were most “penalized” by potential dates of other races.

I don’t think you necessarily need a study to demonstrate this either… across the world, don’t most people date within their own races (and nationalities and socioeconomic classes and politics, etc.)?

It seems a natural consequence of not only ethnic and cultural influences steering them towards wanting to date someone like themselves, but also getting preemptively rejected by the mainstream dating services where things like “No Trumpers, no guns, no shirtless photos” are common refrains.

There’s also Black dating, Christian dating, rich people dating, vegetarian dating, etc. Of all the things to fault conservatives for, wanting to date someone who looks and thinks like them hardly seems like something worth doxxing… it is just stating an explicit preference for something many people across the world would implicitly choose anyway, but are afraid to say out loud for fear of, well, this.

Besides, wouldn’t it be worse if they DIDN’T self-select into these groups and instead ended up in terribly unhappy relationships with people with completely different values, people they consider somehow “less than”? That wouldn’t do anybody any good.

It’s one thing to, say, try to educate impressionable youth away from racism in schools. But to try to force it on the dating age population seems like an exercise in futility.

Of all the things people have strongly held and rarely reasoned passions for, their choice of mate(s) seems like the one thing they should have the personal freedom to pursue without undue outside judgment and interference, as long as it’s between consensual adults and such…

9

There is a pretty big difference between white people and White people. The hacked site was not about people of the same ethnicty getting together. If I found I was getting involved with a White person, I would be out of that so fast.

10

Well, I would too, which is why I’m glad they’re self-selecting onto those sites. Saves the rest of us the trouble of excluding them.

Sounds strange to say this, but I think a white supremacist in a happy white marriage with happy white kids is at least less dangerous than an lonely white supremacist incel… I’d rather they get paired up and, I don’t know, go hunting and ride horses rather than stew online all day about how the world has wronged them. Family at least gives them something to direct love and time towards, whatever their capacity for love is.

But I dunno. I guess at some point it could all too easily cross over into “Zone of Interest” territory too, especially these days when ethno-fascism is so normalized already. The banality of evil and all that.

11

Yeah, I have to agree with you there. I mean if it was “Nazi dating” sure, doxx away. But altho I find the idea of a “Whitedate” site to be- mildly repulsive, I can see legit reasons for joining (but admittedly probably not). Do we assume everyone on Black dating is a bigot also? Are these people going to doxx them? How about Jewish dating sites?

12

Sounds like she’s Bobby Tables’ aunt.

13

Heh. Maybe a good double entendre?

From the article, though:

The name Martha Root is itself a historical reference, a nod to an early 20th-century peace activist and writer. This alias is part of a pattern among some modern-day infosec figures who adopt names of past radicals or subversives as symbolic identities.

It’s a good hacker name.

14

Looks to me a lot like it is that.

15

Every Jewish site I’ve seen allows non-Jews. This is a side issue though. I don’t want to hijack.

16

My impression is that these aren’t just “white people who only want to date other white people,” which is not that uncommon, but specifically, “white supremacists who only want to date other white supremacists.” And they’re being outed not for their dating preferences, but for their white supremacism. Scraping dating profiles from SSCupid is just a convenient way to find a bunch of people who were willing to publicly ID as white supremacist.

17

Exactly.

That is an ideology dating site. It’s honesty trivial to make a fake profile just to see who’s on there so one would be silly to not understand the possibility of being outed. The hackers did it all at once to make it easy on the rest of us to gawk.

18

There’s probably not a way for a white-on-white dating site (or any preferentially “white” site) to not be automatically associated with white supremacists…

It’s like that meme comic:

(from MyGumsAreBleeding)

That said, the site’s About section (archived from WayBack Machine) definitely reads like “we’re trying not to be openly Nazi, but wink wink hint hint…”

19

I don’t think anyone is out there making a dating site “for white people only” who isn’t specifically trying to appeal to white supremacist audiences.

20

Which makes sense, given our country’s past (and recent events). It is very often either a slippery slope or a dog whistle.

There is not really a politically correct way for white people to (exclusively) find other white people to date (aside from going on the mainstream dating sites and just privately rejecting everyone of color).

If you search for “Black dating” or “Asian dating” or “Indian dating” or “gay dating” or “progressive dating” etc., you get a lot of options. Try searching for “white dating” and there isn’t really anything, even before this happened. In fact Google actively steers you to interracial dating instead:

And you can’t filter by ethnicity in the mainstream apps. You could in the past, but I think they took those away during the woke era or just before it. (Or maybe just corporate sanitization at work once Match bought everything.)

I think even the idea that there could be a “white culture” without white supremacy is largely forbidden here. We’re largely culturally taught to equate the two (at least that was the cultural zeitgeist growing up as a Millennial… not sure if that’s still the same for gens Alpha and Z).

A _______ person wanting to celebrate _____ culture with other _____s is fine, as long as the blank is anything but “white”. The moment a group of white people try to do that, they’re automatically thought of as white supremacists. For good historical reasons, yes. But like so much else in our polarized society, the hyper-visible extremes bury the moderates in between. There isn’t really any room left for anyone to be “proudly white but accepting of other cultures and ethnicities too”. To be white and unashamed is to be labeled a white supremacist by default…