Thread by @Dragnet_News

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."

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But maybe the operator of this acct just became a nurse later in 2020?

Not according to other tweets this acct put out. "As a nurse that's worked in healthcare for decades."

This acct is using this claim of being a nurse to add unearned credibility to their narrative.

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But that is far from the full extent of the deception. This account initially had a different handle when it first became active in late 2019. And it had a different username, as opposed to the "Screenname" the acct had listed on the acct in March 2020, as seen in tweet #3.

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The username reads "ابو طارق" (read from right to left), which translates to "Abu Tariq".

"Abu" means "father of." But later, as seen in tweet #4, the operator said they are a mom.

Another bit of deception is found in the "Joined Date" for this acct. It reads "May 2013".

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How is that deceptive? Well, by referring to the first available text-based archive (JSON) in the Wayback archives, we find that the acct had only posted 85 total statuses by late February 2020 and also had only 3 followers.

This is what is referred to as a "vintage acct."

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That "May 2013" date makes the acct seem more authentic, as though the operator has been active on Twitter for over seven years. But it hasn't.

The joined date also acts as a way to hide that this account is a prolific spammer. Someone looking at the acct would not find

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the 51.7K statuses to be suspicious at first glance because they'd infer that these statuses had been accumulated over seven years. But in reality, the bulk of them were accumulated in less than one year.

This acct has averaged 148 statuses a day for nearly a year.

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The recent activity looks like this 👇. Barely any time allocated to sleep, let alone do anything else, such as parenting. In some bursts, the acct produces 46-55 tweets an hour.

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*Note: just because this acct had an Arabic username when it first became active does not necessarily mean the operator is in the Middle East. There are vintage accounts parked all over Twitter which use Japanese, Australian, African, European and other false personas.

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What has this account been doing via this progressive nurse persona? Lately, the operator has been trying to sneakily undermine Bernie and AOC at times.

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The operator is also trying to suggest that progressives are actually very interested in uniting with the Boogaloo Boys.

(I cannot rule out that this acct is an alt of a Boogaloo Boy. But this operator could be anywhere in the world, since Twitter is a global platform.)

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During the election, this acct was smearing Biden as a child predator, using the "mom" part of the persona to refer to an imaginary book the operator was definitely writing, except in Nov 2020, the narrative suddenly shifted to "I could make an educational book."

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Upon reviewing those tweets carefully, you can see how the author just keeps rearranging the content of the tweets to say the same things without triggering Twitter's spam filters. This will also be apparent in much of the forthcoming content.

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The operator was also trying to convince people to vote Green, which would potentially help Trump attain a second term, since this messaging was targeted at progressives.

Within this messaging, there's a sneaky attempt to suggest election machine shenanigans via that

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#HiddenMenu talking point. This messaging is very carefully thought out and the use of a hashtag makes that "Hidden Menu" claim stand out within the content of the tweet.

But we know that talking point is nonsense, because of the below graphic this acct tweeted.

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The menu is not, in fact, hidden. It's a very visible third option in that graphic, along with Biden and Trump.

There was also repetitive use of graphics which claim that Biden and Trump are the same. This is no different than some of the spam that targeted Clinton in 2016.

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If you want to know why some moderate Dems were rather snappy and perhaps even seemingly dismissive during the elections, it is because they were getting spammed by trolls like these. It is not pleasant to see blatant lies being used to suggest some nonexistent equivalence.

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Such trolls also push this "corporate fascism" line, which, in effect, provides cover for real fascism, the kind of fascism that this 'progressive' was eager to try to get progressives to ally with, as seen with those Boog tweets.

These talking points are quite deliberate.

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The operator also seems to want the US economy to crash in the middle of a pandemic. It is this which strongly suggests that the operator is not dependent on the US economy to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head.

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There's more to this acct that those who are interested can review by visiting the acct and scrolling through its activity. As stated at the beginning, this is just a case study and there are plenty of others like it.

Until at least one big progressive influencer decides

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to study this issue and then use their social media platform to inform other progressives, this problem will persist. Only knowledge can combat this, because blocking accounts or suspending accts doesn't really address the problem. They keep coming back. Knowledge is power.

/end