black_madness21/TikTok
September 3, 2021, 7:52 am
It’s easy to feel helpless in the face of devastating political action, and that’s the way many opponents to the new Texas abortion restrictions, or SB8, which allow anyone at all to sue a person who gets or helps someone else try to get an abortion for $10,000.
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But some people are good at turning anger into action and are already looking ahead to organize and give Texas Republicans a run for their money in the next election. Others have turned to more creative ways of fighting back against the law.
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After Texas Right to Life set up a website encouraging people to snitch on their friends and neighbors they suspect of getting illegal abortions, people started organizing across social media to flood the site with fake reports, theoretically making it more difficult for them to parse through the information to find real leads to follow up on.
But Sean Black (@black_madness21) took things to the next level. The tech-savvy TikToker created a bot that will automatically submit one of the site’s snitch forms every 10-15 seconds, ideally creating even more chaos for a prolonged period of time.
The site eventually caught on to Black’s scheme and banned his IP after around 300 submissions, but rather than packing it up and calling it a good run, he came up with another idea.
“But then I started thinking, what if I made this a bit easier for everybody?” he said. “So I made an iOS shortcut…it picks a random city, county, and Texas zip code, and all the other information, puts it in the form, automatically submits it.”
In other words, if you’ve got Black’s shortcut handy on your iOS device and go to the snitch website, you can click the shortcut and have it fill out everything for you — spamming the site with yet another fake “tip” with just a few clicks.
“It will then refresh the page and give you the option to do it again. It took five seconds,” Black explained. “And because you used realistic information, it makes it harder for them to parse through the data.”
That last bit may be of particular importance. As entertaining as it is to spam the site with the names of Fox News anchors or Shrek porn, it’s easier to weed those submissions out quickly. But information that looks real should, in theory, force these anti-choice militants to spend more time, energy, and resources looking into leads that just end up being a wild goose chase.
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People were very appreciative of Black’s efforts, and it didn’t take long for his videos to go viral.
Folks have also been sharing their own additional tips for tweaking Black’s code, and you love to see it.
If you’re interested in doing some research of your own, Black’s initial code can be found here, and the iOS shortcut is right over here.
*First Published: September 3, 2021, 7:52 am
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