On Saturday the 5th the New York Post put up an exclusive article about a few parents groups that planned to pay for a billboard truck to protest Critical Race Theory being taught in NYC prep schools
@soft_fox_lad noticed some suspicious information about the largest of the groups, Prep School Accountability, and shared it with me
As you can see above the user information is part of that page and in this case fed out by a common Wordpress indexing plugin.
Googleing author 2 and 3, we found 2 women who work at a DC based political lobbying firm, Berman and Co
@LastWeekTonight has covered Berman and Co, they are a group involved in what is known as Astroturfing, making political groups seems grassroots when they are actually paid for and operated by the lobbying group
One of the groups ran by Berman and Co as a virtual organization, meaning they have no office and don't exist outside of Berman and Co, is the Employment Policies Institute. EPI is a group that opposes raising the minimum wage
Notice their media point of contact is Petriccione, the same name as the 4th author of the Prep School Accountability website!
There managing director is a senior VP at Berman and Co
Of the 4 accounts on the website 3 of them had @gravatar IDs associated with them
Gravatar is a service that issues you a digital ID that allows people to check that the "you" on one website is the same "you" on another website via a string made up of letters and numbers
Looking at the source code I found the following 3
If you google those Gravatar IDs and check the images page you can often find other websites that same ID has been used on
I googled the first one and found multiple websites using the exact same ID but different user names. Meaning they were the same account but...
..using different handles on each site.
The id for the PSA account, Author 1 on the PSA site, brought up these organization's websites and the following handles
Next I searched Author 2, Bozzello's ID, and found the following article had the same author ID
CABIA is the “California Business and Industrial Alliance” a “trade organization” that wants to fight California’s Private Attorneys General Act. A law that helps workers sue their employer as the state on civil matters
I've seen tweets re:my OSINT thread asking why reporters aren't doing the same thing. I've seen some amazing OSINT work by reporters from small outlets to large, but there is a limited number of reporters with a finite amount of resources and an inverse number of deadlines
I don't blame reporters.
The cost of the entry to create inauthentic behavior/disinformation/misinformation is low, the opportunity cost to getting caught is low, there is little reason not to if you are a bad actor. It is everything from product reviews, to YouTube stars buying views, to nation states
If you rotate which users get the boot or decided to keep a few users the same from each ban wave you also lead to possible splintering or infighting as they try to find the Judas in the group
It is an easy way to create friction in the process of creating new accounts
Most modern search engines, rather than searching for exact words, use Natural Language Processing(NLP) and try to figure out similar phrases and words to what you are searching unless you use quotes around your search which means FIND EXACTLY THESE WORDS IN THIS ORDER
It appears Bing is blocking images from searches for "tank man" referencing the famous 1989 Tiananmen Square photo
If you try being more exacting by searching "Tiananmen Tank Man" you get this