For the kids born after 1995, or those Barney-watchers at heart, here's the short version, so you don't have to read anything that is tl;dr or bigger than your hand:
A Canadian music-loving Granny on Twitter who wanted to school me about my possibly incorrect views on policing in the US, who could try to guilt-trip away my suspicions concerning her new birthdate on Twitter and her low follow/followee count, was unmasked finally as someone who had photoshopped a mug with RGB's picture and initials on it into her wrinkled granny hands -- but even then, had an alibi. They always do. Her dear friend on Facebook did photoshop the RGB mug -- but that was only because he couldn't bear to see RGB's initials reversed as it would be in such a photo and felt he must photo-shop his friend's profile pic to honour our Supreme Court judge. Of course! Great story! Low follows and bad behaviour and meme pushing and harassment are alone proof that someone is inauthentic and not worth your time -- by all means use these as markers, and don't let them guilt-trip you into thinking they are legitimate. But with a little work you might discover they are very fake. My purpose is to get you all to stop talking to people born in 2009 with 31 followers or born in January 2021 with 31 followers, even if you continue to talk to people who have fake names. Improve Twitter. Make your life better. LOOOOK at the person heckling you and calling you names. They are not Intercept journalists or Fox TV anchors but Ankle-Biters.
So I like to take a closer look at my new "Twitter friends" when I ask a simple question about a picture, pushed at me when I expressed a view or a question, and meant to trump all political arguments. I like to try a hypothesis and see if I can get answers, although that's really not what Twitter is made for, or used as. So for now, set aside the actual debate, which was around the troops deployed for BLM versus those deployed on January 6. I voted for Biden; I'm capable of deploring both the excess of one and the absence of another. I try to make up lists of criteria and study events and form a judgement, excuse me. A photo of a few dozen federal troops, as scary as it might seen, as inappropriate as it might be as use of force, as excusable as it might be protecting the Lincoln Monument, is not an end to the debate about what would have been appropriate to ask for and deploy January 6, and what was clearly insufficient. I can lay all that out in another blog post but who needs me to do that? Go on Twitter and find someone who shares your views and cheer them, and harass someone who doesn't if you like, this post is about something else. The spectacle of hundreds of people shouting at you under a tweet like that, accusing you falsely of racism and Trumpism and genocide, screaming nonsense -- most people fear that, most people don't walk into such hornets-nests, most people think if you do, you must be crazy. I'm not afraid. I don't walk into them normally. I do today, just to make a forensic point about such things. I know 99% of this hooting and hollering is fake, and you need to learn that, too.
Here They Are: The Ankle-Biters
What I've always noticed in my 14 years on Twitter (I was an early adapter) is the pernicious and repetitive and growing behaviour of a group of people I call the "Ankle Biters". So you're a person who uses your real name; you are tied to a real identifiable blog and perhaps even a real workplace, but they are anonymous an unaccountable. If you call out that fact, you might get them to back off, but then they will have a guilt-tripping tale about either how their RL abuser will find them and kill them, or you will, because you disagreed with them. They have "trumped" your argument by playing to sentiment or even logic, so while you may attempt to invoke that as a reason of lack of credibility, they turn that against you easily.
So what am I talking about? Not day-old accounts that swear at you and say they know where you live -- your or others might AR them and they get gone. I'm not talking about supposed call girls who follow you and then push porn at you as a way to harass you or use other Internet tricks. Those low-lifes haven't got the memo yet on how to be more successful at harassment -- Good!
I'm talking about the more sophisticated and in my view, organized accounts who do this:
When you are debating a point with other people with even Blue Checks of verified status, or other people who perhaps have no tie to the real world in their Twitter persona, but maintain a steady and respected pseudonymous presence over time, known and respected by you, these people show up to incite, harass, and generally stir up shit. You don't know them, they are "not followed by anyone you know" much of the time. That's one clue. Or if they are, it's random.
You could say they are Kremlin trolls organized by the GRU, and maybe they are, but I actually think they are just groups of accounts wrangled by fatherless overweight children sitting in mom's basement a lot of the time who like to annoy. They have a view of themselves as "on mission" on Twitter -- that they go on Twitter to battle Trumpkins "effectively" or own this libs and believe this battle is actually making a difference. Twitter does that to you. It makes you think you are in civic struggle, one appropriate to our time, especially in a pandemic, and you don't realize that maybe the venue is pointless -- even when a poll shows that only 28% of voters -- or whatever the figure is, it's low -- are on Twitter.
I came to this sort of realization back during the Iranian Revolution when I was valiantly RTing information about which foreign embassies were safe to go to, so that Iranians on Twitter, left on even during Maintenance Day (just like in a MMORPG) by the State Department guy, could get this useful information from me, a helpful human rights activist sitting in her pajamas after helping her kids do their homework. That is, instead of, oh, I don't know, trying to get a meeting with the Iranian ambassador (I did that...once...and let me say they have figured out how to make the pistachios saltier than the tiny jug of lemonade for 40 people can address). I imagined that I was really helping people in a crisis. Of course, intellectually, I knew that as I typed the name of a save haven, an Iranian secret policeman was seeing it on Twitter and blocking it. I knew intellectually that the fleeing Iranian was either dead, or smart enough (unlike me) to get off Twitter in a crisis. But Twitter has a way of making you hallucinate like that. Remember that American student saved from an Egyptian jail "by Twitter"? Well, I knew enough to ask about his Egyptian fixer. He stayed in jail. He wasn't saved.
Most Twitter skirmishes aren't of this momentous nature of life and death, but people still feel they are "on mission" when they indulge in them. I've taken notes on this for years, so now I'll publish them before reading a book.
The Majority of Voters are Not on Twitter
I once talked to a Senate staffer about someone who had written some terrible thing on Twitter. This was a non-event. He said he had never heard of him. He didn't even watch Twitter -- it's not just voters, but assistants of elected officials who are savvy but just busy. But, I said, this guy was widely known on Twitter. This drew scorn. I persisted, and said, "But he has a blog and got himself on Huffpo sometimes." This guy said, "I don't read blogs." I mean, this is an anecdote not about clueless staffers, but people who have to worry about, I don't know, how COVID is doing or whether Turkey runs to the arms of Russia or the EU. You know, bigger things. Yet neither you nor I behave as if we have absorbed this fact and live by it, so let's try to at least "minimize harm" and do "harm reduction" for Twitter addicts, shall we?
Why No Followees, if Not Followers?
So these Ankle-Biters -- they could be a nuclear state with big budgets to do harm; or they could be from Bayonne, NJ. You can't know the difference, but you don't need to. The one thing you *can* do is simply never argue with or respond to people either born yesterday, literally, like a day-old Second Life griefer, or born in 2009, yet with 1 million tweets, yet only a handful of followers. Their obnoxious behaviour may have lowered their count, but really? you only have 31 followers, comrade, after 11 years on Twitter? But more to the point, you only have 29 people you follow? I mean, you aren't following the people you harass at least until they block you? What's up with that?
These numbers are a "tell," I have lived through 14 years of Twitter, and it is indisputably verified for me -- and should be for you -- that low follow/low followee, combined with heckling in the midst of a debate or after your tweet of your controversial article or blog post, is a red flag, and it's ok to admit that, and either ignore or block people. Trust me, if you have been "entertaining angels unawares," and that low followee is @jack on his alt or your boss at a real job, you will learn that soon enough. But most times, it is not.
AGAIN and PLEASE LISTEN. This is a legitimate way to assess any account, and if you missed a non-Blue-Check who in fact is a famous person and a legitimate commentator who just happens to have a Simpson's cartoon character as his persona and nobody even who likes the Simpsons to follow him, and it turns out the guy actually does voice-overs on the Simpsons, well, so what? He or others will correct the record in due course -- and maybe it doesn't matter, if he talks like a Kremlin troll and behaves like a GamerGate regularly, even if he is famous for something.
You know?
Difference Between Twitter and Facebook
On Facebook, sometimes the method of your "new friends" suddenly fascinated with your article about the KGB, who may be in a chain-smoking GRU agent in a basement in Moscow or -- again, Mom's Basement in Bayonne, and you can't know the difference -- is to take the photo of an actual person in the real world, say the commander of CENTCOM, the US forces in Europe, and send you a friendship request and put on his profile that he is a widower and likes children and dogs -- even as he is inspecting those troops in Estonia or Afghanistan or wherever in real life and -- well, with no dogs. There is far less of this on Twitter because Twitter has more techs and pols and just more savvy people and this doesn't work on them. On Facebook, with more soccer moms and pandemic papas, it can work better and does.
CENTCOM Commander Has Time for Moi???
I mean, your first clue is that this very busy fellow who you know is running an army isn't likely to find time for YOU, while you may be terribly flattered, but then if you are diligent, you can look up his real profile in the real world and discover far from being a widower, he's happily married with children. He doesn't seem to like dogs, actually. Or he does, but it's a different dog picture.
These "different dogs" aren't so hard to find, people. These "friends" aren't smart enough to fix obvious errors like that, and it's especially awful when they either use the photo of a person who was killed in a car accident, or noticed your condolences on Legacy.com to the widow of your dad's army buddy, then wrote you to be your "friend" in your hour of sorrow, not realizing that the army buddy was 87 with Alzheimer's, so the fakester's claim that he always talked about how much he loved playing chess with your Dad in his last years, was likely fake -- and PS there were other clues like a) your father is long dead b) he never played chess.
I've had these grotesqueries happen, and on FB it's hard to abuse report them because there isn't a box on the form that says "Is using photo of dead person" or "Is claiming to have talked to Dad who died years ago". They only view these things in terms of "Has this person bothered you?" and then told you, "Well, block him then." Facebook is very, very inadequate to the tasks of the day but that's another story. Fake FB friends also pepper your unsuspecting friends with requests, and therefore may have 6 of them who didn't take a closer look at their fake photo and legend, adding to the sense that they are "ok". I now don't take any friendship requests because I have been bombarded by so many dead people, famous people, people who are supposedly friends of my friends, that I have to just default to blocking all of them unless a real friend in the real world calls me and says this old guy trying to friend me is actually a former correspondent they know who wants to ask me some factual thing.
On Twitter, the set-up is different, the friends aren't quite the same, etc., you know the drill. The chances of someone using the RL photo of a person they are not aren't non-existent, but they are less because people are jaundiced and savvy.
Fake Accounts More Sophisticated, Work Better
So it's easier to make fake accounts in some way on Facebook and Twitter, and it's easy to eliminate the shoddy fakes on Twitter, anyway.
But you don't need any special software or knowledge to realize that people with these aspects of their social media portrait are, shall we say, "organized" or "instrumented" or just chronic jerks. You could point out their mode of discourse, which is to accuse you of not just racism but genocide and CIA employment if you disagree with them, is not very persuasive. People say "don't feed the trolls," but I see very respected and smart journalists answering them, merely to put something on the record. Because they are skilled at this other thing, which is to take the nasty and false claim they made about you, and collect a zillion "likes" and "retweets" on it even though your answer to them should have flattened them (none of their likey-likes are from people who have read your answer or will ever answer it -- it's not in the view). This ability to get their followers and other key-word searchers to amp their response to you, without your original statement being seen, or you subsequent response, is the mark of an Ankle-Biter and the only way to win the game is not to play. Playing seems necessary to put on the record rebuttals of atrocious things said about you, and I get it, and I do it myself. But you can also spot the signs of an Ankle-Biter -- which are different than the classic troll at times, and just cut it short.
I believe that the way to tell fakes or "Invalid Interlocutors" is not, at the end of the day, to become adapt at techniques, and skills, and methods because I think those things only embed you more into the madness of Twitter. I think bad behaviour, bad-faith arguments, ill-will -- old norms of behaviour violated -- are more important to watch for and block for. I've had Twitter send me emails telling me as a public service that this person I talked to and interacted with for years turns out to be a Kremlin troll helmed by a state. So even people like me who watch for the signs of fakeness can be snookered, and the point is -- not to care, and to get your news and sources not only from Twitter. There is no other solution.
I think it's important to get more study of this phenomenon of the Ankle-Biter, because it is so pernicious, so many people feel they can't brush it away without looking like Blue Chekist or Followist elites and jerks, and so they disarm people not persistent enough to tell them to fuck off because their behaviour is bad. They will endlessly go on calling you a racist and elitist and whataboutist anyway, and won't stop, and sometimes this will stick. But you can at least BE AWARE that these people are not legitimate, have needlessly gotten your goat, and have no validity in more ways than you imagine.
So you get a guy like this, whose snarky stage name ought to have been a marker to actually skip him on Twitter and not answer:
My problem, as with other writers I see on Twitter, as unlike, say Facebook, or Second Life, I haven't internalized the analyzing of profiles to eliminate interlocutors, using the dozens of social markers you develop for those purposes.
Why?
Because I don't look at profiles. I feel if I did, I'd fall down a rabbit hole, and that I can't win an argument based on a low follow count on a suspect profile anyway, so I might as well answer "in good faith."
But why? Looking at profiles quickly and seeing tell-tale "Ankle-Biter" status features will help you live your life on Twitter. Do it.
So when you look at this sort of account, you can imagine that @pglover with his lovely sayings and doggy photo is "just a guy," but I wonder if someone who joined in August 2008 -- 13 years ago -- and has managed to send out 13,500 tweets -- not a lot, but still, about 3 a day, which is enough to stay, so to speak, "au courant" can realistically have so few people who follow him. Nobody else I know who speaks in earnest and good will, with that many tweets, or even many times more, has such a low figure.
The figure of 91 is low, because many consultants and media people and various other Internet dwellers follow back anyone who follows them to get up the ladder and crack the ceiling. That's the normal ecology of Twitter.
But the Ankle-Biter has a different mission. He wants to influence someone by heckling them in the interstices of a debate between two people who have accepted each other as interlocutors, and knee-cap their arguments that may seem "elitist" about low followers or anonymity. That's the game. That's it. You can stop reading now if you like.
So why don't you follow more people and get more followers? I ask, knowing the normal flora and fauna of Twitter.
Why?
Why Hasn't the Ankle-Biter Hit the Ceiling?
So, again, with his passionate interest in correcting people who are wrong on the Internet, why does he only have 91 followers? Is he, shall we say, "not nice"? And why only 634 he himself is following -- and that is not the ceiling? Famous people pride themselves on have 100 million followers and only, say, 13 they follow including their children and their hairdresser, and people in good faith often just prefer not to have a firehose of information, but people in the sort of professional bothering business would follow their targets, no? Until they were blocked? or follow news sites to get ideas? Something? 634 isn't a bad number, but the ceiling is like 2000.
I've had to tweet for a living at different jobs for years, and I'm not an expert on Twitter. You can find them online. What I will say is that when you make a new account for some cause you believe in, say, Belarus, or stopping child labour in Uzbekistan, you can't instantly get followers and get noticed unless you buy them, which is a) illegal and b) going to give you a lot of no-shows, creeps, and pornography pitchers in the mix.
So you need to get "native" or "organic" followers by the mantra of "you gotta give to get". So you go and follow people in your field and news companies. The system at first stops you at a certain threshold, I believe it's 200 but they change it, or fix it to an algorithm. You can go on more slowly following people, as long as they follow you back, thereby creating more "points" for you in their internal system enabling you to follow others. Work at this a few hours a day, maybe you have 432 in a month. Maybe you double that, maybe you get to 2000 -- which is the hard ceiling for even diligent work, after, let's say 3 months, if you can't work all day at it but have perhaps 45 minutes a day.
But then...There you sit, watching accounts leave or join as follows, and you can't get over the 2000. I think the Twitter management should remove or raise this, if they have already policed the system for bots and purchased followers, because it's damn annoying and you can't compete with others in the field who collect followers by following people unrelated to them or their topic or anything, just to goose the system. Or people who get followers not because of Twitter, but because of television.
Therefore, if someone who harassed me has 1999 he is following, and only, say, 199 of his fellow jerks following him, that's actually more persuasive than being born in 2008, and having 31 followers. My thesis is that the 2008-born is a purchased account, or an account made by bots, or wrangled by bots or ill-wishers, from whatever entity with whatever agenda, and you should stop paying any attention to them, just like you don't pay attention to day-olds. Somebody bent on proving you wrong in a heated argument who shows up out of nowhere, who can't also collect more than 30 followers or more than 90 he's following over 6 months, let along 10 years, is someone who, shall we say, may not be what he seems. And we can't let the fact that real people with real geolocation may have those features and will be haughtily insulted, the purpose of my post today is to get you to see that there are millions of these accounts, with thousands of them harassing you and others every day, and you need to get better at instantly ignoring them or blocking them.
Invalid Interlocutors
So this guy @pglover in my mind is, if not suspect, at least what I call "An Invalid Interlocutor". The stats of an account are part of what make up the concept of "Invalid Interlocutor" for me -- I have dozens of other concepts I have formulated and written about and I'll post on that another day, but today, let's focus on just the stats.
Because I don't want to talk to anonymous people with a zillion tweets who can't get followed even to the normal point of 400 or 2000. I've been on Twitter since 2007 and have less than 4000 followers. That means a) I didn't work at it b) I have controversial opinions people don't like. That's fine, you may, too, and the Ankle-Biters may, too, but I actually think there's more to them which justifies are blocking of them more quickly.
But I wasn't born in 2007 or 2008 and have only 31 followers. And neither were you. So let's make these accounts invalid socially, and force them to do better at faking and harassing -- where they will be more obvious, or less, but at least not able to use THIS gambit.
The Lady Doth Protest Too Much
Anyone who starts carrying on with an objection to your elitism because you invoked their low follows is someone who is not organically in the real low-follow column because such people will say, "I don't have time for Twitter," "I'm disabled and on oxygen and can only type 30 minutes a day" or "I'm here to learn," or something that may be authentic, or may be fake, but doesn't require another answer from you.
The "geniuses" who guilt-trip you, who claim to think that means you are being haughty and "followist" by thinking that only people with lots of followers or even the Blue Check "count", is a social engineer. He knows that by turning your suspicion of low follows against you, he has triggered you into self-defense and guilt about your followist values, thinking only people with 100,000 followers matter. Listen closely to the point here: this is not about arguing what the true merit of follows are. It's about realizing that manipulators goad you and try to turn a valid suspicion into a social commentary you feel called upon to answer, and sometimes, through many rounds. The real person without time or in a wheelchair doesn't feel that need -- he doesn't goad and doesn't engender a follow-up.
Because people are so invested in followdom and put it on their resumes, and then feel guilt-tripped or feel they have to justify themselves to the little people, they can get faux-angry as the Woke do if you question low follows. So they join the Ankle-Biter in harassing you and querying pointedly why you have these bourgeois, elite values -- values they have with a Blue Check or a million followers, of course, but ones that they think you can be crushed over and not them. It's sneaky. It's hard to get out of this feedback loop.
But that's not what I mean. Let's try to set aside elitism, Blue Checks (some people have them to prevent harassment by "False Dmitrys" and not vanity).
I mean that in a world where people interested in a topic or a cause can get 2000 followers, or let's say 432 and then 864 by due diligence, as I have done in various NGOs or at media sites myself, then they should not have only 30 or 91 or 123 at the age of 11 or 13 in Twitter years. They should have more. So it's not about prestige. It's about trust, which is not built when someone has not just 30 followers, but they've only been interested to FOLLOW 30 people as well. So I want the Kremlin trolls and the vested in Mom's Basement to have to work harder at harassing me -- I want them to have 2000 witnesses to their bad behaviour, or at least to have to lose time faking that with their machines or their time budget.
How Do Ankle-Biters Find You?
So, you ask, how did they cross the street to come heckle you about, say, the troops deployed before, during and after January 6 and your attempt to understand this and form a view about this? If they are a followers of yours, or you follow them, or they follow someone you re-tweeted, understood. But that's not who they are.
Because they sit and key-word search all day. So they find these conversations and interrupt them. This stands out more on Facebook so that when you and a group of your close friends who go to your church are debating a topic like abuse by priests, and they show up with not only no friends, the picture of a famous person who ought to have friends, and begins barking at you, they stand out, so you ban them. On Twitter, there are too many millions of Ankle-Biters, so you can't control them, seemingly, by blocking. There's always another.
Examine your own behaviour on Twitter which you yourself know as authentic, to assess the behaviour of Ankle-Biters.
I seldom key-word search unless someone has died and I'm attempting to see if anyone put up the news yet, or I have in Russian a notice that someone is arrested, and I don't want to sit and translate it, so I'll see if it is in English. That is sure, I keyword search for cause, for a purpose, for news.
What I don't do, and I think most people of good will don't do, is say, hmm, I have an opinion on January 6, or I have an opinion on abolishing the police, or BLM, let me sit and keep searching and Googling on those terms like "BLM" or "Jan 6" until I find someone who says something I don't like, and heckle them. It's THAT behaviour that stands out for the Ankle-biters.
Why Ankles?
Why "ankle-biters"? They seem to bite your face, who you are as a person in the real world who has given your identity, so why "ankles"? Because when you state your opinion on Twitter as a real person findable in the real world, or when you put out a fact you have researched that someone doesn't like, you are on a ledge. You are "out there". You are walking a tightrope. And when you do that, there will always be people who want to bite your ankles and make you fall down. Keep walking, and block them.
The cost that Ankle-Biters can inflict is very high. If you study the situations where people are fired from their jobs, embarrassed, harassed, forced into apologies, sure, sometimes it's their actual assignment editor or managing editor or boss or some real figure like that. But sometimes it's somebody with the name of a cartoon character born in 2008 with 31 followers. Why do they count? Why do people let them count? Why does ANY editor allow them to be embedded in a news article of a respectable outlet EVER? Why are they stampeded into "followism" concerns and unable to ask questions about why someone has so few people to follow -- if not followers they've attracted -- in 11 years of tweeting 1.5 million times? These are warning signs. Look at the accounts of people you dislike, but who have real names in the real world. That ratio doesn't hold for them. Look at people who are maybe your aunt who is timid on Twitter but who you know is real. She won't have tweeted 1.5 million times, she won't have harassed people, she won't have deleted her tweets, she will lurk and have 32 follows and among her cat pictures might be an opinion on 1/6, but it's not the profile I'm calling out here.
Who is This Guy?
It may be that @pglover, or "Skip Intro," one of my hecklers (he might follow me to keep heckling me, or might not) really is a designer of video games, a GamerGate famous person, or a dog lover, or a lover of silly Internet jokes about butts, and that's all there is to it. He has tweets that seem to indicate this. Maybe he's a health care company employee, or maybe bug catcher for an IT department, or maybe merely a patient, who knows. Maybe the other guy with the forest picture is the real Derich March, a CEO, a man with that name you can find. Or this guy (are they the same?) But I don't think so. Because I think that real Derich will care more about follows and following, you know? That is the "display name" of "Derich March" on this account created with this handle might or might not be the REAL "Derich March". I frankly don't have time now to go research whether he is or isn't. BECAUSE IT DOES NOT MATTER IF HE IS FAKE OR REAL, PSEUDONYMOUS OR WITH A REAL NAME, HE'S STILL AN ANKLE-BITER.
I don't have time to Google him or @pglover today, and you don't need to. Maybe he's a real guy, or his typist here will express faux-indignance at my distrust. But I view him -- real or fake -- as a warrior in the Twitter wars in which some people have created or wrangled bot or account armies, and I'd prefer Twitter to be a civilian struggle. That is, he could be a sentient being who entered into the Twitter wars as a real soldier, not a bot, not a wrangled account, but he still has signs on his profile that mean YOU DON'T NEED TO TALK TO HIM.
His follows are low, so when @pglover snipes like this, not even getting the point, thinking he's "laid you low" by invoking the Soviet "whataboutism"...
with the typical argument meant to guilt-trip a "followist" you move on:
You can move on. To the next one -- or not.
I take him as an example but he's an account of somebody nagging and heckling me, but he is much newer. Not even a year. Would that real CEO or that Cisco guy "Deric March" have only joined Twitter NOW? Really? Maybe he didn't like Twitter. Not born yesterday, but bored in the pandemic, possible, a lover of green spaces, who has put Woody Guthrie's guitar as his photo, a signal that not everyone will understand, but which means he's a lefty folkie lover and against the Vietnam War or maybe the Iraq War. He puts "Dad" so you know he's a good guy, and maybe he is a dad. He puts "entrepreneur" so you don't think he's in the German or Russian Communist Party and his arguments come from their ideology, although they may very well come from such things. Etc.
While Andy Greenberg is not old enough to remember Woody Guthrie's guitar in real time, he made his book on WikiLeaks a version of this title; it's popular. So this "Derich" or fakester may or may not be real-time or tech-familiar, but still, it's not typical. Most people do not use this guitar from real-time or its modern invocation. And if they do they follow more people.
And as an aside: I refuse to get into a debate about what "heckling" is, and somehow concede broad-mindedly that someone who talks to you when you have not talked to them, who keeps arguing with you even though you haven't sought further discussion, is not a heckler. Because he is. You don't know him. You don't follow him. He found you in a giant thread of a famous person, or key-word searching, he needs to "call you out" and "set you straight" -- has has Ankle-Biter status. No question. Our job here is to AVOID ANKLE-BITERS, NOT FIND PERSUASIVE ARGUMENTS FOR THEM.
So I really do not give a good goddamn whether this guy is that actual CEO tech guy of that actual company or what-the-hell and turns out to be a jerk -- or a fake using his name. I don't NEED to find that out; I don't need to do forensics; I don't need to call California. Because this guy has a "tell" which is LOW FOLLOWS and that is LEGITIMATE.
Guess what, there's another count with that display name who is also born in 2009 and also has low follower numbers.
Maybe THAT Derich Marsh just doesn't like Twitter. Understood.
So, looking closer, bored Pandemic Lost-His-Business Dad Derich Marsh (let's say, to ascribe to him some actuality in the real world)....still has only 61 followers, despite a relatively sizeable number of tweets. Why? With his passionate desire to enter the conversation you are having with the one pseudonymous, although at least polite and credible interlocutor you've found to debate the merits of troop deployment.
Mind you, these chats take place under the tweet of a giant among Blue Checks, Michael Bechloss, with his zillion of followers, his books, his deep knowledge of presidential history, and his ability to plant provocative tweets while he spends the day in real life, making real money, and not carrying about the havoc among his Twitter followers, because none of them will ever, ever get him fired. Bechloss now has 6,236 retweets, 634 quoted tweets, and a whopping 37,600 "likes". His reach, which is gadzillion more numbers of accounts has been assured by Ankle-Bitters that came and sniped at people RTing or quoting him. That's how Twitter works. That's the insight. Twitter is based on empty calories which is why Bechloss still writes book to influence people, still gives talks to make money, and has real meetings with real people in meat-world if he actually wants his insights to influence people. On Twitter, he is merely throwing chum to sharks.
So maybe Pandemic Dad just found you because you answered Bechloss -- which means he had the patience to scroll through literally thousands of answers. (YOUR view of your own answer is at the top -- his view is NOT).
That's another sign. Who does that? Who has the time? Who LOOKS FOR an answer to a Blue Check 1,000 lines into the "thread" which isn't really a thread (it's one provocative tweet with jillions of answers) -- doesn't like that answer, and decides you need a talking-to? Only -- now we're talking -- he could be someone instrumented, with an agenda, and for that purpose, using fake accounts or wrangled accounts. A real Dad with a real Woody Guthrie guitar ethos with a real Google-findable company will not have the time to do that or even the inclination. Why? Because he will follow people. Lots more of them. He'll follow people he likes. He'll get followed back by other Guthrie lovers who oppose wars. He will have a modest but reasonable set of numbers.
I want common sense, logic, and above all -- your own knowledge of your own authentic Twitter behaviour -- to guide you here, so that you stop letting a goof like this make you feel defensive when you call out his low numbers. His low numbers confirm his Ankle-Biter status -- don't bother with him any more. You can block him, and listen to 10 other of his fake pals call you out for "not being willing to hear the truth," or you can ignore him and not bother to block him and give him that pleasure. You can "mute" him so he doesn't appear in your feed, but doesn't know he's blocked. I don't care if Robert Scoble himself calls me and tells me this guy is real and legit and lives next door. He's identified as an Ankle-Biter -- you know what to do.
Why Haven't I Called This Out Earlier?
Now, why haven't I written about this phenomenon I noticed back in 2010, if not earlier? Low-follows = fake. Low-follows= still a jerk even if real. Same with followers!
Yet I've often treated each skirmish as a one-off, saying sometimes in shocked realization (because I don't first study a profile before responding -- everyone should!), oh, you're a low follow! You're born in 2009. These two factors are enough to discredit nearly everybody who harasses me; they ought to do the same for you.
But...who wants to give them ideas, so they make their fake accounts better? Because at this point, seeing too many journalist and NGO friends wasting time on Ankle-Biters, I want them to get a little more discriminating. Yes, if the fakesters get better at making more realistic accounts that oldbies like me on Twitter can't see through, that's not good. But my thinking is that along the way to doing that, they will have to get real followers, and follow real people, not just fakesters like themselves. That is sure, the Kremlin kitchens have the ability to get fake accounts to sit and follow each other day to be more persuasive, but various other non-state actors may not have the time or scripts to do that.
It's within our power to make Twitter better, not by giving it up for Lent, not by scolding ourselves for being addicted, not by never posting, but by becoming aware of this simple phenomenon which pertains in the majority of nasty encounters on Twitter, and can be made less, if not eliminated, by just more awareness.
History of Twitter
And again, it's important to know: Twitter did not police scripts and bots before X date. 2010? I don't know. But certainly not 2007, 2008, 2010. (If you need to Ankle-Bite on THAT topic, that's fine; if you don't know that and don't believe it, go and Google it).
I was there, however. I stood witness to the debates on this; I saw big guns in Silicon Valley purchase followers and use those scripts to add followers because they could, because their behaviour with a new tool is to kick the tires until it breaks, they like doing that. That havoc is left for the next 10 years isn't of interest to them, they left Twitter for Facebook and now they are in Clubhouse. Whatever. Read my old post about my concern regarding Robert Scoble's conversion of Congress to Twitter; I felt someday, there would be a senator or a president who would have followers he could block, thereby rendering "the right of the people to assemble" and "make known their concerns" etc. would be thwarted. Well, was I wrong about that?
So frankly, anybody from 2009 that I didn't know from Second Life or a Tech Crunch conference -- the only people really caring about Twitter back then -- is not someone who I want to be my "friend". Because: scripts. Sure, tell me about the new bots and the new scripts etc. etc. I get it as a concept but I don't need to hear all the details. Yes, I remember once I picked out the fact that a certain publication from Crimea was on the desk of a certain very popular Internet figure. But he didn't know Russian. But he wasn't Russian and didn't seem to be a Russian plant. So why? Because that shopper had ads for bot farms you could buy. That was my theory.
Breaking Bad with an RGB Mug
Now let's come to Gretchen, who has the name of a "Breaking Bad" character - yeah, by one letter difference. Of course, this is possibly a real name in the real world. Will it be in Montreal, where there are a lot of French names? Sure, Montreal is a big city with all kinds of people in it. That's not a marker. Still, if you see a "Breaking Bad" character's name -- not one of the main characters, so people may not notice it unless they binge watched, and even one letter off -- if you see a capital of the world where a lot, if not all, are Francophone, well, put up your antennae a little? You know? It's ok.
Here's a newbie Tweeter, two months old, old enough not to have been banned for harassment and violating the TOS, but still, suspect, because, as I keep on saying, if you care about politics and things like troops and January 6, why are you following only 159 people? You CAN follow more. You didn't, because either they blocked you or you don't care, you are not there to really engage authentically. You have so few followers because people don't like being harassed on Twitter or talked down to or at the receiving end of a pushed meme or canned thought.
Are you trying not to be noticed, except for those times when you come into the interstices of a debate like I'm having, and heckle me? So, go through the routines -- which I'm not afraid of -- and call out low followers and "Montreal" and "Breaking Bad" and hear all kinds of "legit" answers to those markers of fakeness. I am fearless and can't be fired from a job, I don't have one. Are you? Do you? But at least be curious about "31" in a case like this.
She's going to try to be "sophisticated", however, and first play the "granny" card which will disarm people; she will say "Montreal" so that no one will ask whether she is in a Blue or Red State; she will say "music" which is a crowd pleaser. Yep, checks all the Kremlin troll or bot farmer boxes, but what if she really is a music-loving granny, and your jaundiced eye questioning her followers or anything about her whole shtick is wildly wrong?
Mugs on Mugs
Well, long-time Twitter users, not just observers of Kremlin fakes and such notice an obvious thing -- her mug does not fit on her face correctly (and trust me, I am NOT an expert on this; I am not formally trained; I used to do this job for 5 years but don't now, and don't wish to for lots of reasons). A little observation with a little naked eye will get your spidy sense up that something doesn't sit right. I've reversed the photo to help see it better, that helps sometimes.
A real mug on a real face, which you can find anywhere among your real friends "places" better and doesn't block the hand or fingers supposedly holding it and is in better proportion to the face, even if a big mug. There's another obvious thing about it but because I didn't blow it up and really go at it, I didn't notice.
Pushing Further
So the basics are, you just Google search a photo like that -- will you discover she has taken this photo from a car accident victim? No, she's not that stupid.
Second, just cut out the eyes, because the mug is "funny," and the eyes may match. Then reverse, search for that, too. Search with key words, etc. Nope, they don't turn up anything, again, they aren't stupid. These are old tricks that now they compensate for. You may still find people who have been careless enough to harass you and learn your home address who forgot their photo was taken from a beloved granny who died 10 years ago, but there are less people like that now.
Then you reverse the photo of the eyes or segment again, always an important step in examining anything that looks funny, because the laziest trick of fakers is just to reverse the image. So go on Tin Eye or reverse it yourself on Paint or a free program, then search again. Many a "tractor driver" claiming to be "from Donbass" would forget that reversing his photo was not a "thing," that any idiot could un-reverse him and find he was in Tambov really, from birth, except for his "summer vacation".
So now what? No searches come up. Seems like granny may be legit. Her mug doesn't sit right, but you didn't find another granny without a mug. If you say "your mug was photoshopped," she will find another photo of herself with the mug and the web site she ordered from it. This will go on for days, weeks.
If you are motivated, by something like the invasion of a country, you might dredge down in the Google results or try some other stuff (and no, please, examination of "metadata", as I generally find, is USELESS as fakes on Twitter are smart enough to STRIP THAT OUT or distort it, as anyone can easily do. This one says NO METADATA, for good reason).
Mugging the Mug
Well, let's go back to that funny mug. Run it through one of the free programs all over the Internet that show you what MIGHT be fakes but which are NOT definitive. Still, the white mug here stands out as having been, shall we say, "parachuted in". It has NO metadata because it's been stripped. It has all that other stuff you can study and write dissertations on, I'm not interested, I don't play Twitter much and I don't play THIS Twitter came for fun or profit. I feel citizen journalists are neither citizens nor journalists, but I'll talk about that another day.
But what it does have is a funny white spot.
So now comes time to ask "Gretchen" about her dropped-in white mug. Remember, I haven't even noticed the MAIN THING about this photo which the smarties would have seen because I have not LOOKED. Life is short, then you die.
I've just concluded after using this tool and reading up about it -- though sure, I could be horribly wrong, that there is some tinkering here.
She can argue all kinds of things. The free "forensic" photo service is flawed, here are 10 real grannies harmed by it (they try this ploy often). Or, that doesn't prove anything (she's right, it doesn't). Or, the forensic service is owned by evil Facebook or evil CIA and their software is destroying society. Whatever distraction is possible, she might deploy, but still, there is is, that funny thing -- the whiteness of an object in the environment with no gradation, just "popped in" to the photo, indicating "Photoshop".
"That One Time, On Facebook..."
Aaaannnnd....here's the conversation:
So, hilariously, she reveals MORE information on the way to trying to deny what little actual suspect stuff you've found. I didn't notice that in the real world of real selfies, your "RGB" on an RGB mug would look this this, with the mirror effect:
Or maybe not, depending on how they took the "selfie" and with which program, but her "cover story" here does win the prize today.
But here's her conversation, ringing all the chimes on all the themes you'd expect -- all using the Saul Alinsky methods -- which are actually synthesized Lenin methods -- to put you off balance.
The last, is my re-focusing her on her first comment to me, which kind of gives the lie to her idea that she's "not trying to set anyone straight".
So now, comes the icing on the cake, a contorted admission that is as phony as a three-dollar bill, along the way with some valiant efforts to make jabs about spelling (calculated to induce guilt or embarrassment). That is, the GRU or the kid in the basement who is just annoying (and you can't know the difference -- no you can't) is going to go find a real granny in Montreal and produce her for you, because that may be part of the operation. And that's fine, because tricks and tips and tools are fine in their way, and useful to undermine something like this, but the real "tell" was more about how people really talk in the real world -- and you've lost touch with that, and even before the pandemic.
Oh, gosh. Who among us hasn't had one of those OCD friends on Facebook who contacts you about your account photo and says they've been bothered by that reverse "RGB" for months -- years -- and want to fix it as a sign of respect to the late and great Supreme Court judge.
Why, surely you have several people IMing you even as we speak! LOL
Don't let the fact that there is no Gretchen Swartz on Facebook with this picture stop you from indignation!
A "Reverse RBG" in SO Many Ways
But the comedy gold was that once you stand up to a person like this, and unmask them, they may tell you something more. I didn't even notice the backward "RBG" but she now thinks I did, and has contorted her "cover story" accordingly. Fascinating? She could have just talked about the dropped-in white mug (or the stencil of one mug on to another) -- which is dropped in to cover a face, which may or may not be real, or not originally an RGB mug but one with BUT FIRST, COFFEE stenciled on it. She could have just talked about the mug. Instead, she talked about the reversed RGB I didn't even notice, my eyesight isn't great.
So now you see how contorted her stories are, and her alibis, and that alone tells you are dealing with a) an organized, instrumented force like a state or b) a kid with lots of time on their hands who enjoys picking wings off flies.
A person like this will go on lying like a QAnon for days and weeks with ever more convoluted back stories but as I said, not playing Twitter. "Not today, Satin" as the kids say.
I could tune in 2 weeks from now just out of curiousity -- are any of these people banned? When about once a quarter, I check "Who Unfollowed Me," it's odd that so many of them are in this category from that utility: "23 people have unfollowed you who were removed from the system," i.e. after heckling you for days on end, they must have committed a Twitter offense, mild or severe, buying accounts or botting, or harassing people, and they're gone. They unfollowed me, then got b& as the kids say.
I'll just park this one here now, because I see ANOTHER one of these Ankle-Biters, "@DeboraMaffei2" is still nattering responses to comments about her fake name, which is unable to be found anywhere in the known universe, saying it could be a real name or maybe just a name to protect her from stalkers blah blah blah, even though yesterday, she said "medicine" as if to imply the one person who had a name like that WAS her. Real doctors don't have time to heckle people on Twitter, however.
Deep Storage
Another fun experiment is to take a person who harassed you, who has 31 followers, and only 1900 tweets, and then see a month later if they go dormant and never talk again for a year. Because she's in deep storage until she is trotted out on another ankle-biting mission. If they have Tweet Deck, and multiple browsers and computers, people can play this all day long with hordes of accounts, retiring and activating them at will, and never worrying about follow count. It may be automated with the ability to talk normally. Or not. I don't care. What I want you to do, is to make it harder for people like this to do it, and guilt-trip you as a followist.
Real Interlocutors
Twitter should be a place where you talk to not just real people in the real world as you should on Facebook, but something different, if the person doesn't use their real name. Any Ankle-Biter trying to make THAT argument -- as one is now as we speak -- doesn't get it that I have been deeply immersed in studies of pseudonomity and its uses since before they were born, and that's NOT what Ankle-Biters are about, nor should be credit for, or given the benefit of the doubt about. Real pseudonyms do not protect manipulators -- because they don't manipulate. Real pseudonyms don't keep people from accountability -- because they are accountable. You know?
Jesus said, "By their fruits ye shall know them." That ought to be all you need in the way of training to be on the Internet and have a useful conversation, and avoid idiots and people who will harm you. But people don't read the Bible, don't go to church, and don't think about parables any more, and prefer having forensic tools that enable them to swagger around as -- what I've said before and will say again -- citizens who are not citizens, who are not civic or civil, far from the scene -- and journalists who are not journalists, and have no ethics or skills or editors.
So yeah, I'll talk to people like this even if they have pseudonyms:
o a person who has a persona, but who is consistent -- they don't play anti-Kremlin for 3 years then bite you if you criticize Snowden and the next thing you know they are celebrating Steve Bannon. That's a red flag. Real pseudonymous people don't criticize Snowden in 2013 and worship him in 2021.
o a person who doesn't argue that you are suspect for suspecting fake names because you don't understand pseudonyms -- real people with monikers for the Internet don't feel the need to heckle you on this score.
o a person who may have a pseudonym, but doesn't just push memes and photos and slogans but talks reasonably in coherent sentences. That is, real pseudonymous people don't think a photo trumps every argument. How could it? The observant will have noted it has 40 soldiers in it, not 400 and not 4000, and the space they occupy is only one part of one side of a building that is 27,336 square feet, not a city block typical of, say, New York City, which is 660 by 330 or 217,800 square feet, and (for extra credit) faces out at possible demonstrators not in the picture, but has no demonstrators in the building behind them.
This photo is emblematic of many things for many people, and sometimes completely opposite things, but it may not make your argument in the best way, and you can be more curious. Questioning this photo and its forensics or social meaning, doesn't mean you can't condemn the killing of a demonstrator in Charlottesville; of course you do! Or that you can't condemn the looting of stores by Proud Boys in December 2020; that you somehow endorse the abhorrence of January 6. Of course you do. You just think it's ok to debate the size of troop deployments for different occasions.
It just means that you want to have a critical conversation about what factors go into troop deployment; that you have read newspapers and Wikipedia articles that show enormous amounts of damage from looting and rioting by seeming BLM supporters, if not actual BLM marchers, who were mainly peaceful. That you are trying to get the information to make a balance sheet, not be moved -- or threatened into silence -- by one photo.
That you want to THINK. That you want to understand why the Black Mayor of DC did not request the troops, or find out who is supposed to request them if not she. Etc. Etc. You may, or may not, after the kind of deliberative thinking that goes into that process, if in good faith, say, yes, federal troops are racist because they overdeploy for BLM and underdeploy for Proud Boys. I actually am not making such a glib pronouncement because I believe it is complicated. I think I'm capable of showing concern about deploying federal troops to Portland where they don't belong, yet ask why Portland's leaders let get things out of hand. I'm capable of supporting BLM broadly but still asking questions about the enormous amount of lost livelihoods of immigrants and BIPOCs which were destroyed by their supporters. People don't like balance sheets that might seem to pit one killing at one demonstration and a few looted stores against two killings at another demonstration with no looted stores by different parties, even if they can go back years. I don't care. I want to think. I know that calling a group of federal troops that may include Blacks among them or not "racist" is not to end racism.
But the FBI...
Yeah, I'm able to read, too, ya know?
The FBI has said a contradictory thing: it does not monitor ideology and police thought, and only looks at crimes against persons and property, and therefore can't tell you about anti-fa's guilt. Yet it has also said that it can tell you that the majority of cases of violence and terrorism in the US are perpetrated by white supremacists. So I can say I accept that, as you should, since by all forms of evidence in the media and by credible groups, it appears to be true, but I can also point out that it is contradictory given their claim that they "can't" tell which violence is perpetrated by anti-fa (when they can by white supremacists); that it raises issues about political surveillance and the legacy of watching MLK.
I can do this without taking shit from a grandma from Montreal who loves folk music who has photoshopped her RGB mug on to her own mug, surely undermining her credibility, whatever her crazy cover story is. I can do this even if I can't prove she did this because she has 31 followers and was born 2 months ago, or 11 years ago and has been silent. I can do this, without playing "citizen journo" all day on Twitter and becoming as bad as the perpetrators in the process -- and so can you.
So some of the people who harassed me in this conversation, who have funny names, pictures that look fake, but 4000 followers and the ability to stay on topic and be polite, I might continue to "friend," but honestly, as I said, I can't play Twitter for long. It's enervating. I will come on daily, I'll try to stay "current", I won't let the threat of job loss intimidate me into silence.
Twitter, Your Boss
Twitter is still the assignment desk for mainstream and alternative media. That isn't going to change although it's appalling. Twitter putting Net Nanny crap in to tell you to read an article that you just read -- or, hilariously, may have even written -- is not going to curb this.
Closer examination of "Friends" with Internet tools or common sense -- frankly, that's not worth much, either. And people playing this game live for their new endorphin rush, which is finding out "Granny" has a photoshopped mug and her comments in favour of Russia in Ukraine, let's say, therefore are "sus" as the kids say. There are a lot of people who get a lot of adrenalin rushes from exposing fakes on Twitter, and I fear the fakesters know that and keep their victims hooked deliberately, waiting for the day when they can really poison them well and truly.
I think if you are a journalist, you need to put on two masks and pad out to the neighbourhood or go to the thing, and report, and wash your hands well afterward, if you aren't in a risk group. You need to call on the phone and try to talk to a person. If you can't or won't do those things, then at least craft a more substantive email and try to get answers to it. Don't get it all from your new friends on Twitter.
Low follows/followees discredit people. They always have. They always will. You need not talk to them. They need not guilt-trip you. Let's have arguments with people who are accountable and have witnesses and play Twitter in good faith. Not fake accounts put in storage for 11 years and wheeled out only once to harass you before they go to sleep again. Let's have conversations with real people, even if they have pseudonyms, who behaved well enough, and were interesting enough, to have even a modest number of normal followers.
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