Serdar Argic

spamming incidents on Usenet.

The lawyers Canter & Siegel are usually cited as the first major newsgroup spammers, but in the months before their "green card" spam, Argic spammed the newsgroups with Turkish propaganda. Even before that was a huge, one-time spamming of "Jesus is coming soon", which predicted the end of the world, from an academic account listed under Clarence Thomas III. Immediately afterward, the end of the world message was cancelled.

The identity of the person behind Serdar Argic was a Turk attending the University of Minnesota named Ahmed Cosar who had engaged in historical revisionism during discussions of the history of the Armenian Genocide. For a period of several months in the first half of 1994, the Internet user under the pseudonym of "Sergar Argic", claimed to have a doctorate and posted messages in any newsgroup thread involving the country of Turkey.

Furthermore, every time the word "turkey" was posted on any newsgroup, an automated program posting as Serdar Argic, posted a reply in the same thread, in which he argued that the Armenian Genocide had not occurred -- or that Armenians had committed genocide upon Turks.

Argic's postings soon numbered in the tens of thousands, and averaged over 100 posts per day, the highest post count of any single Usenet entity. He posted to several newsgroups, especially soc.history, soc.culture.turkish, and misc.headlines. Because of the posts' repetitiousness and canned responses, most observers correctly concluded that they were being automatically posted by a software program which scanned for keywords in certain newsgroups and replied with a canned response. This program, or "bot", would scan through newsgroups for any new appearances of the word "turkey" or "armenia" and respond with pages of revisionist history. The bot would automatically post a reply with a political statement about the Armenians -- even if the original message had simply referred to Thanksgiving turkey but was crossposted to a soc.* group.

Internet users sent a barrage of complaints to UUNET, the Internet service provider hosting the account of Serdar Argic. UUNET never replied to any of the complaints -- a fault that would be greatly magnified when spamming became an increasingly common problem on the Internet in the years to follow. Their justification was because Serdar Argic was posting from a host downstream from the host they fed (anatolia!zuma) which they had no control over. Thus, Serdar Argic became known as the Zumabot.

At the time, 3rd party cancellations were feared, as they could set a precedent to cancel posts that were simply disagreeable to the one cancelling the messages. Cancellations were rarely done at the time, because spam had not become the problem it became in the subsequent years. The Serdar Argic posts suddenly disappeared in April, 1994, after an Armenian (Stefan Chakerian), created a specific newsgroup (alt.cancel.bots) to carry only cancel messages specifically for any post from any machine downstream from the anatolia UUNET feed which carried Serdar Argic's messages. This dealt with the censorship complaints of direct cancellations, because carrying a newsgroup was always the option of the news feed, and no cancellations would propagate unless the news administrator intentionally carried the alt.cancel.bots group. If sites chose to carry the group (which most sites did), all of Serdar Argic's messages were removed from all newsgroups. As a result, during a series of rants, Ahmed Cosar revealed himself as the creator of the "Argic-bot" and disappeared soon after. Cosar created the group alt.cancel.armenian.garbage in an attempt at censorship of his own, but never posted cancellations to this group.

Serdar Argic's messages are considered to be a poor attempt at historical revisionism.

See also: List of e-mail spammers