Thread by @z3dster

z3dster.medium.com/astroturfing-d…

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

https://twitter.com/soft_fox_lad/status/1401702805879013378

The website for PSA was built on Wordpress, a content management system, which automatically creates pages for each author of the site. It's simple to find by just adding /?author=# to the end of the home url:
prepschoolaccountability.com/?author=0
prepschoolaccountability.com/?author=1

prepschoolaccountability.com/?author=2
prepschoolaccountability.com/?author=3

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

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employmen…

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

Author 1 — AKA PSA — 90a09ed027901e34e98ad536287b3a14
Author 2 — AKA Charlyce Bozzello — 77b26c940744b3dc3cd34348b6077eae
Author 3 — AKA petriccione — 9b0893716cfdd17fd0b17cc1374d8e2b

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

dir.ca.gov/Private-Attorn…

Michael Saltsman, managing director of the EPI and Berman and Co SVP just happens to be on the board of CABIA

Google Ms. Bozzello also bring up her other work for Berman backed Orgs like the anti-union Center for Union Facts

norfolkdailynews.com/commentary/let…

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_fo…

Using the website @tweepdiff I compared the followers of the Center for Union Facts and the Prep School account and there were two

Mr. Saltsman again and Tim Rice, who works at the Washington Free Beacon and happens to be engaged to one Charlyce Bozzello

I then used @tweet_beaver to download the then 611 followers of the @/PrepSchoolAcc and found the first 448 followers to be inauthentic accounts

They all looked like this:

I also graphed the year of account creation for all 611 followers

I also notice two sets of six accounts each had been created on the same days

This is pretty unlikely

@TwitterSafety's rules around Platform Manipulation are pretty clear that this sort of behavior isn't allowed help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-p…

I went and looked for who the first legitimate follower of the Prep School account and it was... the author of the original NYPost article

If you read the medium post I dive in more into the open source tools I used and the other two parent groups the NYPost cited

The prep school account also has an @instagram, wonder if that too has fake follows... Oh yes

But he has army gear, wonder what that Russian says...ohh....

I know you were worried but don't be, Dana, ali727201, and ali72701 follow it

Of course, don't even think of asking if they are affiliated!

Nice that Bari, who is on the board of FAIR, found time to write on this specific topic

The Twitter account was suspended