Taking A Step Backwards

There’s a lot of content on Twitter about how awful Twitter is after the Musk takeover.  Some of the more visible mainstream media content about this is focused around the well documented cutting of staff to crippling low levels, antagonizing more or less legitimate advertisers, reinstatement of previously banned right wing extremist accounts, and Musk’s predilection to act on a whim and behave like a hypocrite.

Every once in a while, mostly motivated by boredom, I will search the word “gematria” on Twitter to see if there’s any deeply unserious accounts stirring up trouble. At a quick glance this is one such deeply unserious account:

Whether it is up to no good or just somebody with strange standards of amusement remains to be seen.  I have some experience with these things and have some tricks to further the research along.

Many years ago, out of boredom again, I took on a throwaway quickie project on Facebook.  Like many other people I wondered exactly why I got so many porn style Facebook friend suggestions.  To understand this phenomenon, you can start with a real life example.  You might end up being friends with someone you aren’t really friends with, yet peer pressure or whatever gets you sucked into the circle.  If your girlfriend’s friend is into, say, Mary Kay cosmetics, and you’d never heard of them before, no all of a sudden there is pseudo-advertisement for it just by the association.  Maybe your Mom would like some of that pyramid scheme facial beauty.  You may never even know Mary Kay is a notorious MLM example.

So, at one time Facebook had every single common name covered.  You could count on a network of fake accounts having most or all of these characteristics:

1). Super attractive girl in limited clothing.

2). One of the top most frequent last names (Smith, Brown, Jones, etc…)

3). Common first name

4). A friend list of similar account names.

5). No attention to profile details.  E.g.  Asian woman named Denise Jones living in a census designated area with a population of under 1000 that literally lists occupation as a model miles away from any major metropolitan area.

As for Twitter, one of my go to research tactics is looking at the follower/following lists for the same reasons.  As for my buddy I put the screen grab up, yep we scored some red flags.  A couple of accounts that list more accounts in their profile, all with the same style of name - gibberish (just like the gematria phrases) and the number 69 (sometimes 1969).  A pretty good indicator of a bot network.  Other accounts, Crypto Bros, more gibberish style account names instead of “@DeniseNJ17” or something more believable, etc…  Curiously, there doesn’t seem to be other gematria users.

Back to Facebook - a social misfit male having a cognitive bias of accepting a friend request from a pretty girl without vetting her is understandable.  Now he is by algorithm standards defaulted to crank magnetism advertisement.  Catfishing, pay to view porn sites, and all kinds of other friend of a friend dangerous activity.

One of my research super powers is extreme patience.  I’m more than willing to use some of my idle boredom time to scroll through an entire 1000+ list of followers just to see if there’s something there worth digging deeper into.

So why exactly is this post titled what it is?

Scrolling through the followers doesn’t work like it used to.  Now the most you can see is around 50 of each of the follower and following accounts.

Uh oh.  That can’t be good.  I suppose it’s possible that it is some kind of space savings on the server thing.  But if you are following a legit account with lots of followers, shouldn’t you be allowed to search out like minded people.  Based on Twitter’s 2023 track record on safety and security I doubt this is beneficial to the site.  I’m inclined to think that the 950 followers are always running in the background, generating what promoted ads you get recommended, follower suggestions, bots that auto reply to your posts.

Grifters long ago figured out methods to make things that now in retrospect are easy to say should never have gone viral.  Like the Alex Jones method of stirring up hatred towards an innocent scapegoat.  You just never know what they’ll pick next.  Sure the next pandemic will be declared a hoax.  Sure every politician will be attacked (probably as they should be).  Sure climate change is going to be denied.  Sure a mass shooting will have false accusations of crisis actors.  But the specifics are to be determined.  Just by reviewing the analytics and seeing what gets the most traction.

Now I suppose Elon might be a remarkable and kind genius that is intentionally smoking out unserious accounts, spending his personal fortune to purposefully get at the ring leaders.  Gonna have to go with heavily doubting it.  The one big selling point that concerned him on the purchase of Twitter?  Bots.  He was gonna get rid of the evil bots.  And yet here we are making it easier for them to hide among accounts with big followings.