ORIGINAL LINK
Have you ever been called a Russian bot or a "sock puppet?" I know I have. Of course, I just have to shrug it off and get back to my life. No sense in trying to focus on it, and feeding the trolls is always a bad idea but apparently, in light of the NPC (non-player character) meme becoming so widespread, Twitter has decided that this sort of "dehumanization" can actually lead to "world harm." Go figure, they didn't seem to have any problem when it was just folks like me being dehumanized, but now it's an issue so great it could literally cause the whole world grievous harm. If you're not familiar with gaming culture, a bit of an explanation is in order. NPCs or "non-player characters" are the background in a game. They only have a set of pre-programmed responses to choose from and their activities are limited to pre-programmed sets of actions. An example from Existenz, one of my favorite films by David Cronenberg, occurs "in-game" when the game designer Allegra Gellar asks NPC...
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