Black TikTok Coder Takes Anti-Student Loan Campaign Offline Using Spam Bot
Black coder, Sean Wiggs, has created a platform online for writing code to spam and troll companies that are unjust and discriminatory.
Wiggs recently used his coding skills to oppose a Texas law banning women from having an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. After successfully shutting down that website, he has set his eyes on a new target, the Job Creators Network’s anti-student loan forgiveness campaign.
Earlier this year, President Joe Biden announced a new plan to cancel $10,000 of student loan debt, allowing millions of Americans to apply. However, despite many people viewing this as a step in the right direction, one group has actively been campaigning to take legal action against debt forgiveness, claiming it is unfair to people who’ve already paid their loans off.
A form on the Job Creators Networks’ site titled “Is Student Loan Forgiveness Unfair?” was reshared multiple times on the internet, encouraging people to fill the online forum with their response to the question, “Why are you frustrated with the Biden administration canceling student loan debt for some people?”
Sean Wiggs, known for using his coding skills to shake the table, decided to counteract this group’s movement by creating a spammer bot that would populate the form with fake applications.
“The goal with all of the sort of spamming tools that I’ve created is to put [fake information] into forms so that the people who are [parsing through] the information have a harder time finding the real information,” Wiggs said.
“So if Republicans can’t find plaintiffs for the class action lawsuit, all of the emails they’re sending out are fake emails [and] they’re calling into the void. They can’t bring a class action lawsuit against student debt forgiveness.”
By Thursday, over 120,000 forms had been submitted through Wiggs’ code, and almost 24 hours later, the Job Creator Network’s form was taken offline.
According to Wiggs, his work with spam bots isn’t just targeting and unveiling the unjust corporations in the world. He also wants to inspire more people to use tech in the same way.
“I definitely want to see this continue to grow because I’ve seen people telling me that they’ve been inspired by the work, that they’ve done the same,” Wiggs added.
“So I hope I inspire more people to get involved and use tech in this way.”
