Today seems like a good day to do another case study. A Twitter user pointed out this acct to me.
Typically, when I find anonymous accts that are trying to baselessly smear various Americans like John Cusack or Jane Fonda by calling them pedos, such accts are pro-Kremlin.
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And while some may be inclined to focus on the MAGA costume, sometimes it is just a costume. They may tepidly support someone like Trump due to the damage he causes to the West, rather than any other reason.
America ain't rootin for Putin, troll.
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Of course, this acct has promoted QAnon. Very unsurprising.
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And this acct has targeted McCain. While certain people may not agree with McCain, there's a different reason for a particular type of troll to target McCain. He was one of the few who understood what Putin was up to and who took it seriously years ago.
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And how could I go without mentioning that this acct was promoted by the Internet Research Agency's trolls, almost as if this acct is one of theirs or something. 🤔
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The problem, I fear, is that we have yet to take these trolls as seriously as we should. It seems that people may falsely believe that Twitter has taken care of the problem. Unfortunately, ban evasion is all too easy. It's routine.
Influencers should take this problem seriously.
Note: the folks who spotted this acct and its smear campaign initially were @MarinaGipps and @TAPSTRIMEDIA.
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A synopsis of Q's points of alignment with the Kremlin
- Attacking the GEC, which fights Russian meddling
- citing Russia Today
- reproducing content that first appeared on USA Really (an IRA operation)
- citing headline from New Eastern Outlook (Russian propaganda outlet)
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- citing Your News Wire, a known Kremlin proxy outlet
- citing headline from Veterans Today, which regularly traffics Russian disinfo and is reported to be run by the Russian govt
- pushing claim that John McCain created ISIS (IRA talking point)
- pushing Seth Rich conspiracy
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- pushing link to NabuLeaks YouTube channel before it trended, thus becoming a key reason it went viral
- using known Kremlin tactic of fabricating claims of sexual perversion to target Americans
- undermining reports on Russian trolls
- pushing bogus smears about Ukraine
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Thread: If you're hunting for something to call BlueAnon, this thread's for you. You could call it Mirror-Q, because instead of being sold to Trump supporters, this is being sold to those who oppose Trump.
This is the biggest Intelligence Operation in History, of course.
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There's a worldwide house cleaning on the horizon which encompasses the Vatican, the US govt and the Royal Family. This is a battle between Good and Evil.
There's a "World Wide Cabal" to be taken down. A Luciferian Cabal. A storm is coming, you see.
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And Mueller is on a secret mission to take the cabal down. This is way bigger than Trump. This is WAY BIGGER than US. Trump is just small potatoes here.
There are sealed indictments. Hundreds of them. There will be mass worldwide arrests. People are in full panic mode.
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."
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.
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.