Borgvertising

 

Yesterday I discussed the use of bots to invade social media threads.  Today I’ve got fresh material about gematria accounts that help spread misinformation.  Real humans with little regard to facts and evidence.  Real people that can actively fight back when challenged, bridging the gap between straight up bot spamming and rational and intellectual discourse.  A sort of conspiracy cyborg - it can react to death threats without sitting by ideally.

Starting off with the main players, the Twixter accounts aren’t terribly important.  Fairly typical embrace of multiple conspiracy theories.  But note that the Tom Numbers account proclaims that he’s the best in the world at simple gematria.  The Burtlin account has a varied array of conspiracy content.  You aren’t going to see a consistent theme.  So while bouncing around on various conspiracies he’s got a video from Tom Cowan.

Tom is quite the big name in the anti-vaxx scene:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cowan_(alternative_medicine_practitioner)

Alternative medicine translates to pseudoscience fake medicine that doesn’t work.  And the 5G making people sick instead of pathogens is Tom’s bread and butter.  “Breathing electricity” is not a real thing.  Even though Cowan gives a basic explanation of the process of breathing, the mere existence of a headline claiming we breathe electricity serves as a grift magnetism dog whistle.  Anybody gullible enough to display interest in that content is susceptible to other similar content.

Call it what you like, conspiracy catnip, chumming the waters, baiting the hook, the intent is to use social media to replace the old process of mass emailing millions of people and concentrating on the ones gullible enough to respond.  And on social media, they come to you and make it obvious they’ve got some interest.  Even if they dismiss a singular idea like breathing electricity the echo chambers are filled with anti science content.  Some of it more destructive than others.

I call the process “outstupiding” the competition.  The purposeful creation of the rabbit hole that those who lack decent critical thinking skills fall into.

It starts off with the old idea that germs are a hoax.  Ages old superstitions still linger that what you can’t see with the naked eye doesn’t exist.  And your alternative medicine cure is what the fix is since you’re not focused on the (fake) problem.  But that’s not stupid enough.  It’s so old that just repeating that doesn't make as much of a splash unless you up your game.  So through in that it’s 5G cell phone activity that makes you sick.  Now that’s been talked about a lot since Covid.  So it’s time to outstupid that.  Now it’s still 5G, but because you’re breathing electricity.

And just like 2018 through the pandemic recovery there’s always gematria accounts latching on to the stupidest of the stupid.  That’s what it’s designed for.  Conspiracy theory light, attracting those who surf through the news headlines just to whine about the bad news of the day.  Being king of the gullible people might not be high quality attention, but it is attention, and it’s MONETIZED, attention.  There’s an incentive to keep outstupiding the competition.  Unregulated social media is a haven for spam loving scammers looking to outstupid the other grifters, never knowing what is going to be the next Ivermectin or Nigerian prince idea that really takes off.

Direct grift of gematria isn’t doing as well as it did pre 2020.  The same way that Hubbard and the other early leaders took advantage of their loyal lieutenants (who have mostly disappeared by now) as free advertisement, now they are the chumps being used by bigger influencers for free advertisement.  Someone that doesn’t solely rely on gematria, but adds it in to the mixture, making it a homogeneous mixture of bad ideas looking for the next big score instead of the repetitive niches the old school gematria clique leaders carved out for themselves.  The hunter has become the prey, so to speak.  And even those that hunt the former hunters are having a difficult time selling gematria as a worthwhile add in to their outstupiding detectors.  So look for more of this with the election getting closer.  “Gematria” accounts spreading a wide variety of baseless conspiracies because gematria by itself just isn’t stupid enough anymore.