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posted by mrpg on Friday August 18 2017, @12:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the color-me...-anything dept.

Over at StatNews is a story on a recent trend where low cost commercial DNA testing is resulting in a number of White Nationalists taking genetic tests, and sometimes they don't like the results that come back.

The article looks at research on how they respond to the sometimes unexpected results:

[...] In a new study, sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan examined years' worth of posts on Stormfront to see how members dealt with the news.

[...] About a third of the people posting their results were pleased with what they found. "Pretty damn pure blood," said a user with the username Sloth. But the majority didn't find themselves in that situation. Instead, the community often helped them reject the test, or argue with its results.

Some rejected the tests entirely, saying that an individual's knowledge about his or her own genealogy is better than whatever a genetic test can reveal. [...] Others, he said, responded to unwanted genetic results by saying that those kinds of tests don't matter if you are truly committed to being a white nationalist. Yet others tried to discredit the genetic tests as a Jewish conspiracy "that is trying to confuse true white Americans about their ancestry," Panofsky said.


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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday August 18 2017, @03:56PM (2 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Friday August 18 2017, @03:56PM (#555941) Journal

    There are multiple studies that shows that witnesses are extremely unreliable.

    So there's not much left. Perhaps correlation?

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  • (Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday August 18 2017, @07:11PM (1 child)

    by Osamabobama (5842) on Friday August 18 2017, @07:11PM (#556037)

    Data forensics will become a courtroom staple. Experts will testify as to the veracity of video evidence, and eventually DNA evidence. There are already such experts, of course, but their testimony will adapt to the new challenges. It will be the same as it is now, with different standards.

    That is to say, there will be evidence faking and corrupt experts in the future, just as we have now.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @08:07PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @08:07PM (#556077)

      Acting as big brother and meting out arbitrary justice to us all. How many clones do you have left, comrade?