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by non-entity
2141 days ago
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I never really believed the scale at which foreign (or domestic) actors could affect people politically. I thought the idea that ads or social media posts had any significant effect was laughable. One time, however, I was browsing Twitter, particularly a political thread. It was relatively level-headed (at least as far as social media politics goes) until I saw one reply. Everything about this account was a perfect caricature of what I despised. From the profile pic, to what they retweeted. It was stuff that was genuinely disgusting and most people would be appaled by it. Their profile said they were a writer at "some website" and I decided to check it out. The site itself was rather boring with multiple articles that really didn't make sense and seemed more like SEO blogspam content, so out of curiosity I did a whois on the domain. The site was originally registered a month prior. The Twitter account was the same age. I realized that this probably wasn't a real person and that I had been successfully baited into being pissed off. Can't say who or what is projecting it, but looking back a lot of accounts I've seen in the replies of Twitter threads are probably the same story. I had an idea to collect a database of similar accounts, since they seem pretty easy go find, just so I could play around with the data, but ended up not doing anything. |
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Follows, per that campaign doc I linked. It's interesting how complex it's getting!
That threat intel report was dropped, I went to the website to scope out some of the "authors" that were attributed and saw their articles. I went back a day later and the authors' posts and profiles were down.
What also stood out to me was that website direct linked to some more substantial websites like Zerohedge. Zerohedge has long been iffy, but it still gets read by professionals for the financial analysis it includes. It has a good rep in this area per some historical research it produced.
Just in terms of tight network links, Zerohedge leads to Drudge leads to Fox, which. That's fascinating to me. Your description of that website sounds a lot like campaign's base website for its "authors."