奥巴马首条Twitter遭遇侮辱性回复

Obama’s Twitter Debut, @POTUS, Attracts Hate-Filled Posts

奥巴马首条Twitter遭遇侮辱性回复

WASHINGTON — When President Obama sent his inaugural Twitter post from the Oval Office on Monday, the White House heralded the event with fanfare, posting a photograph of him perched on his desk tapping out his message on an iPhone.

华盛顿——当奥巴马总统周一在椭圆形办公室发出第一条Twitter帖子时，白宫高调地对此事进行了通报，发布了一张奥巴马靠坐在办公桌边缘用iPhone点送帖子的照片。

The @POTUS account — named for the in-house acronym derived from “President of the United States” — would “serve as a new way for President Obama to engage directly with the American people, with tweets coming exclusively from him,” a White House aide wrote that day.

这个叫做@POTUS的账号——以内部对“美国总统”的英文首字母缩写命名——将“成为奥巴马总统直接与美国民众进行交流的新途径，而上面的Twitter帖子都将由他本人发出”，一名白宫幕僚当天写道。

But it took only a few minutes for Mr. Obama’s account to attract racist, hate-filled posts and replies. They addressed him with racial slurs and called him a monkey. One had an image of the president with his neck in a noose.

但是仅仅过了几分钟，奥巴马的账户就吸引了一批充满仇恨的种族主义帖子和回复。它们用带有种族偏见的侮辱性语言跟奥巴马打招呼，称他为猴子。其中一则帖子还带有奥巴马的脖子被套在绳索里的图片。

The posts reflected the racial hostility toward the nation’s first black president that has long been expressed in stark terms on the Internet, where conspiracy theories thrive and prejudices find ready outlets. But the racist Twitter posts are different because now that Mr. Obama has his own account, the slurs are addressed directly to him, for all to see.

这些帖子反映了美国第一任黑人总统遭遇的种族敌意。长期以来，网上一直存在以毫不隐晦的方式表达的这种敌意。在网络中，阴谋论蓬勃发展，偏见也找到 了现成的发泄渠道。但是这批种族主义的Twitter帖子有所不同，因为奥巴马拥有了自己的账号，这些诽谤就直接针对他本人，所有人都能看到。

Within minutes of Mr. Obama’s first, cheerful post — “Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack. Really!” it began — Twitter users lashed out in sometimes profanity-laced replies that included exhortations for the president to kill himself and worse.

在奥巴马发出第一条愉快的帖子——“你好，Twitter!我是贝拉克。如假包换!”——之后几分钟，一些Twitter用户就用时常带有侮辱性字眼的回复发动了攻击，其中还有人劝奥巴马自杀，有的甚至更糟。

One person posted a doctored image of Mr. Obama’s famous campaign poster, instead showing the president with his head in a noose, his eyes closed and his neck appearing broken as if he had been lynched. Instead of the word “HOPE” in capital letters as it appeared on the campaign poster, the doctored image had the words “ROPE.”

其中一人发布了一张图片，其中对奥巴马著名的竞选海报进行了修改，从而显示的是奥巴马的头颅被套在绳索里，双眼紧闭，脖子似乎断了，好像被用过私刑一样。在这张经过修改的图片中，上面的字不再是原来竞选海报上大写的“HOPE”(希望)，而是“ROPE”(绳索)。

The accompanying message said “#arrestobama #treason we need ‘ROPE FOR CHANGE.’ ” It was addressed to @POTUS by a user calling himself @jeffgully49, who has posted other images of Mr. Obama in a noose, and whose Twitter profile picture shows Mr. Obama behind bars. “We still hang for treason, don’t we?” his post said.

这张图片配的文字称，“#arrestobama(逮捕奥巴马)#treason(叛国)我们需要‘变革的绳索’”。这是一条圈送给@POTUS的 帖子，发布者是一个名叫@jeffgully49的用户。此人还发布了奥巴马被套在绳索里的其他图片，而他的头像是关在铁窗之后的奥巴马。他的帖子写道， “我们还是会因为叛国罪动用绞刑，对吧?”

The writer, Jeff Gullickson of Minneapolis, Minn., subsequently posted on Thursday that his reply to Mr. Obama had earned him a visit from the Secret Service at his Minnesota home. Reached for comment, Mr. Gullickson responded by asking in an email how much The New York Times would pay him for an interview.

随后，这名身在明尼阿波利斯的用户杰夫·格利克森(Jeff Gullickson)周四发帖称，他给奥巴马的回复致使特勤局去了一趟他在明尼苏达州的住所。在联系格利克森置评时，《纽约时报》得到的回复是他在邮件里询问时报愿意为采访付他多少钱。

White House officials and a Twitter spokesman said they could not determine the percentage of postings to Mr. Obama that were racist. But they appeared to be a small number in what was an otherwise social-media-fueled show of love for Mr. Obama, who was drawing followers at a breakneck pace — nearly 2.3 million by Thursday afternoon — and hundreds of worshipful messages that welcomed him to Twitter and praised him on everything from his appearance to his policies.

白宫官员和Twitter公司的发言人称，他们无法确定写给奥巴马的帖子中有多少比例带有种族偏见。但是，这类言论似乎颇为有限，淹没在了社交媒体 引爆的对奥巴马的众多爱慕之声中。奥巴马以极快的速度吸引了众多关注者——周四下午已将近230万——以及成千上万的对他表达崇敬之情的帖子。人们欢迎他 来到Twitter，并且对他从外形到政策的方方面面进行了赞扬。

“I love you, @POTUS,” wrote one person, @camerondallas, who has nearly five million followers, in a posting marked as a favorite more than 15,000 times.

“我爱你，@POTUS，”一个名叫@camerondallas的用户在帖子中写道。该用户有近500万关注者，这篇帖子也被收藏了逾1.5万次。

But there was one measure of a specific slur. According to analytics compiled by Topsy, a research company that collects and analyzes what is shared on Twitter, the number of postings that included Mr. Obama’s name and one particular racial epithet jumped substantially on Monday, the day of the president’s first posting, to 150.

不过，针对某个具体的侮辱语是有衡量标准的。Topsy是一家搜集和分析Twitter上的分享内容的研究公司。从它进行的分析来看，在总统发出第一条帖子的当天，也就是周一，同时包含奥巴马的名字和一个有种族主义色彩的特定修饰语的帖子的数量大幅增至150条。

One Twitter user who did not use that specific racial slur responded to the president with just two words: “Black monkey,” a comparison that was not uncommon. “Get back in your cage monkey,” another person wrote.

在回复总统时，一名未使用那个具体的种族侮辱词语的Twitter用户只用了三个字：“黑猴子。”这个比喻并不罕见。“猴子，回笼子里去，”另一个人写道。

Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said the language directed at Mr. Obama was unfortunately “all too common on the Internet,” and that officials would probably not spend much time trying to block abusive commenters from the president’s account.

白宫新闻发言人乔希·欧内斯特(Josh Earnest)说，针对奥巴马的这些辱骂“在互联网上太过常见”，这很糟糕，但官员可能不会花太多时间去试图阻挡总统帐号遭受的恶毒评论。

“What we believe is that the president’s new Twitter handle is one that can be used to important effect and to communicate with the American people and to engage the American people,” Mr. Earnest said. “We’re pleased with the early response to it.”

“我们相信，总统新的Twitter帐号可以发挥重要影响，并与美国公众沟通，激发他们的参与感，”欧内斯特说。“我们对它获得的初步反响感到满意。”

The Twitter account @BarackObama, which was created eight years ago and is controlled by the liberal activist group Organizing for Action, has long been a target of racist postings, as has the official @WhiteHouse.

Twitter账户@BarackObama是“行动组织”(Organizing for Action)在八年前申请的，目前也由这个自由派活动人士的组织来管理。该帐号长期以来都是种族主义帖子的目标，就像官方帐号@WhiteHouse一样。

Top advisers to Mr. Obama, who pioneered the use of technology in his campaigns, regard such hate speech as a relatively minor price to pay for the opportunity Twitter and other platforms provide to reach voters directly. Twitter, which has been criticized for not cracking down on so-called trolls who post abusive or inappropriate comments on the social networking platform, does not police individual users or initiate its own action against them.

奥巴马的一些顶级顾问首开先河地在其竞选活动中使用了科技手段，在他们看来，Twitter等平台提供了直接触及选民的机会，遭遇这种仇恨言论只是 一个相对较小的代价。有人批评Twitter没有整顿其平台上那些发表辱骂性或不适当评论的“喷子”，但Twitter不愿意像警察一样管辖个人用户，也 不愿意主动采取行动来阻击这些言论。

“The potential for anonymity allows people to say offensive, horrible things on Twitter that they would never say anywhere else, but we’re talking about a tiny fraction of the community,” said Dan Pfeiffer, Mr. Obama’s former senior adviser and longtime aide who pushed the president to engage on social media, including urging White House officials to create Twitter accounts.

“由于发言在很大程度上是匿名的，有人会在Twitter上发表一些在其他地方永远不会说的令人厌恶的攻击性言论，但这只是Twitter社区上很 小的一撮人，”丹·法伊弗(Dan Pfeiffer)说。他是奥巴马的前高级顾问和长期助手，曾推动总统参与社会化媒体，例如敦促白宫官员创建自己的Twitter账户。

“We know those sentiments exist, we know those comments are on Twitter or other social media platforms, but you’d be missing a terrific chance to engage with a lot of really good non-trolls if you stayed off of them because of the tiny fraction of people who are doing it.”

“我们知道这些情绪的存在，我们知道Twitter或其他社交媒体平台上有这样的帖子，但如果你因为一小部分人这么做而不上社交媒体，你就会错过与非常优秀的网友互动的绝佳机会。”

Still, the rise of social media, coinciding as it did with Mr. Obama’s political ascent, has made this president a frequent target of hate-filled Internet speech and threats. The phenomenon spiked during his campaign and the days leading up to his inauguration in 2008 but has since subsided.

尽管如此，由于社会化媒体的兴起与奥巴马在政治上的崛起正好在时间上同步，这位总统常常成为互联网仇恨言论和威胁针对的目标。在他的竞选过程中，以及2008年就职典礼之前一段时间，这种言论和威胁出现飙升，但后来逐渐平息下来。

The Secret Service has a special “Internet Threat Desk” that monitors them, assessing whether they constitute a genuine danger and what should be done in response.

特勤局有一个特别的“网络威胁工作组”(Internet Threat Desk)来监控这些问题，评估它们是否真正构成了威胁，以及应该如何应对。

“People have the right to free speech,” said Brian Leary, a Secret Service spokesman. “We also have the right and an obligation to determine a person’s intent when they say something.”

“人们有言论自由的权利，”特勤局发言人布赖恩·利里(Brian Leary)说。“但当一个人发表言论时，我们也有权利和义务来判断此人的意图。”

The response can range from a conversation determining someone’s intent all the way up to working with the local United States attorney’s office to prosecute someone, Mr. Leary said.

反应范围轻至用谈话来确定此人意图，重至与当地联邦检察官办公室合作来起诉此人，利里说。

Law enforcement agencies can also submit requests to Twitter when postings appear to pose immediate physical danger to someone, and Twitter will provide information about the account. A Twitter transparency report for the second half of 2014, the latest available, showed that the government had made more than 1,600 such requests. Twitter had furnished information in 80 percent of those cases.

当贴子中出现马上会对某人造成人身伤害的迹象时，执法部门也可以向Twitter发出申请，Twitter将提供相关的帐户信息。Twitter最新的2014年下半年透明度报告表明，政府已经发出过逾1600个这类申请。而Twitter已经为其中80%提供了信息。