This tweet is how a troll army tries to trick people. Elon Musk liking someone's tweet doesn't result in them accumulating nearly 950K followers as of right now.
How can you tell? It's simple. Look through Musk's likes and find rando accts and check their follower counts.
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You can then compare their follower count to archive records to see what the follower count was before Musk liked their tweet.
But really, there are plenty of examples where you don't need to go thru that extra effort. Like this acct, which only has 401 followers at present.
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What is additionally suspicious about this WSB Chairman acct is this 👇, which makes it seem like maybe this acct is a repurposed QAnon acct in disguise.
Moreover, this acct was created in May 2017 & deleted all tweets from before when it changed the handle to the current one.
Addendum:
This acct has accumulated more 'followers' than the official WSB mods Twitter acct.
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I thought I'd put together a case study for progressive Democrats and progressive Independents. I hope it will be useful.
Anonymous accts have been hijacking our language and then using it to advance their agenda for years. I've been studying this activity for some time.
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I will be highlighting one such account. There are layers of deception that such accounts use which most people on Twitter do not have the time to uncover.
I first noticed this acct due to a long thread that was targeting Ana Kasparian. The operator was backing Jimmy Dore.
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*Note: the above is just the opening sequence of a much longer thread.
Let's start with the very beginning of this thread, "Nurse here, Ana!"
How is that deceptive? Well, earlier in 2020, this acct tweeted, "I'd quit if I were a nurse."
In October 2015, the NYT wrote about how Trump came to dominate Twitter, with one section describing how "hundreds of thousands of strangers defend him."
But it was the section about "Gary Forbes" that I found most curious of all.
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It was not just the coordinated activity which I found notable. It was also the careful language they used regarding "Gary Forbes."
"A man identifying himself as Gary Forbes" sounds like a very careful way to say that they weren't able to independently verify his identity.
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Further, "Gary Forbes" referred the NYT to the Trump campaign and Hope Hicks said "Forbes" was not affiliated with the campaign. So, someone was being misleading there.
The biggest reason that this "Gary Forbes" caught my eye is because I had previously come across a
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In my estimation, the best way to know what is happening on Twitter now is to see what happened in the past.
For example, let's look at 'Jennifer Myers.'
(Note that I don't expect many will see this thread as I don't have a network promoting me.) 🙃
[2] When we look through some of the tweets this account put out in 2016, we notice a peculiar pattern. Many of the tweets have roughly the same amount of retweets. A sampling is provided below.
[3] When we look closer to see who retweeted those tweets, we see that only 18 of the 398 retweeters still remain on the list.
Note that the retweet count stays as it was at its peak, even as accounts are deleted or suspended.
This figure tells us that 380 accts are now absent.
In 2014 & 2015, this hashtag began being spammed on Twitter. The first Twitter account to frequently spam this hashtag is one that is currently promoting Trump and QAnon.
[2] Another account which heavily spammed this hashtag in 2015 is currently inactive. It has not tweeted or liked any content for over seventeen months.
This account spammed this hashtag from August to December 2015.
[3] As you can see in that screenshot, this account has a Facebook page it kept linking to. That Facebook page can be found here: facebook.com/ThePeopleRISING
There is also a blog listed in the bio of this Twitter account.
The first thing that struck me was how active this FB was-
You ever feel like you're experiencing Groundhog's Day? I've been experiencing this feeling ever since the 2020 primary season began.
I would like to illustrate this by reviewing a shapeshifting account which operated from April 2015 to July 2016.
[2] The first thing I'd like to note is that this account is just one of many that were never cleaned up by Twitter. Perhaps one might believe that Twitter has taken this issue seriously. But have they?
What happened in 2016 on social media was a matter of volume. That volume -
[3] has not been addressed. Twitter has continuously low-balled the volume, as seen by the initial numbers they revealed to the public which kept growing larger due to pressure from reporters, investigators & Congress.
I digress. Let's take a look at the early life of this acct
A thread on a matter I've been thinking about and digging into for a bit:
[1] New evidence has come to light which further supports a theory I've had, based on the timing of certain events. For instance, NATO StratCom recently performed a study on manipulation service providers.
[3] They found that only 3 of the 100 impostor Twitter accounts were removed from Twitter after reporting. This equates to 97% of the fraudulent social media accounts on Twitter remaining active despite having been reported.