Show notes, references & transcript: https://psychgrind.com/dont-feed-the-trolls/
Don’t Feed the Trolls · episode 003 - A discussion on the true reality of inauthentic discourse in the information space of social media, and the incentives for internet trolls.
This podcast discussion is about the information landscape with a focus on influencers and the content creator gig economy, and the effects on society with your hosts CHLOE HUMBERT and MATT STRACKBEIN. Music and interludes by MICHAEL STRACKBEIN without use of A.I. Chloe Humbert has a weekly newsletter and podcast on substack called Don’t Wait For Everybody. Matt Strackbein, aka The Letterhack, makes comics and livestreams at YouTube.com/TheLetterhack.
References:
Ellen Hopkins (at ellenhopkins.bsky.social ) posted September 20, 2025 at 5:31 PM If you’re not totally aware of how bots try to sway minds, here’s a good example. at lindytrader. 1.1K reposts 59 quotes 3.3K likes 70 saves post includes a screenshot from the app formerly known as twitter with posts as follows: at lindytrader 55m As a lifelong Democrat, I didn’t know what to make of Charlie Kirk. I’ve since spent several lunch breaks watching his debates (FULL videos) and have come away with the impression that we got him all wrong. The reaction from those on my side of the aisle have really made me Show more 1 reply 4 likes 82 views alex at unfollowalex. 2h As a lifelong Democrat, I didn’t know what to make of Charlie Kirk. I’ve since spent several lunch breaks watching his debates (FULL videos) and have come away with the impression that we got him all wrong. The reaction from those on my side of the aisle have really made me Show more 1 reply 1 like 65 views Erik at e_cdalton. 1d As a lifelong Democrat, I didn’t know what to make of Charlie Kirk. I’ve since spent several lunch breaks watching his debates (FULL videos) and have come away with the impression that we got him all wrong. The reaction from those on my side of the aisle have really made me Show more 7.6K replies 12.8K retweets 99.6K likes 2.4M views
The curious case of the Tesla Tiny House spam - No, Elon Musk is not selling tiny houses for a few thousand dollars each - Conspirador Norteño Aug 15, 2025 There is in fact no such product as a “Tesla Tiny House”, but that hasn’t stopped some of the posts in question from going viral, particularly on Facebook. Unsurprisingly, most of the posts are from large generative AI content farm accounts, many of which have been repeatedly renamed. The “Tesla Tiny House” posts are all extremely similar, consisting of AI-generated images of imaginary hi-tech homes, generally accompanied by a caption mentioning the alleged price of the nonexistent domicile. The prices are often unrealistically low for U.S. homes, even for houses as small as those depicted. The houses in the images are somewhat surreal and resemble structures from science fiction films. The “Tesla Tiny House” meme is not limited to Facebook; variations on the concept have been popping up with increasing frequency on a variety of platforms, including YouTube and X.
Payday Report - UAW Staff Strike Ignored as Labor Influencers Fear Losing UAW’s Social Media Reach - Mike Elk Dec 04, 2024 “It’s strike day 2 and we are angry and determined to make this place better for staff organizers and the members we organize alongside. Cut our pay, cut our healthcare, we are not going away.” Given the high-profile media attention on UAW President Shawn Fain and the fact that the strike is occurring in the media hub of New York City, you would think every labor reporter in the country would be covering this. However, outside of Payday Report, no other labor reporter or labor publication has covered the strike. So, why would so many labor journalists ignore this story of hypocrisy by UAW President Shawn Fain? They need the social media engine of the UAW in order to make their work go viral.
Payday Report - UAW Prez Threatened to “Slit the Throats” of Critics as He Pushed No-Bid Contracts with DC Firms - Mike Elk Jun 18, 2025 The federal monitor’s report, released yesterday, raises troubling questions about UAW’s approval of no-bid contracts to DC political consulting firms in violation of the federal consent decree, which requires UAW to seek three bids for each contract.
TribalGrowth - 7 Best Marketplaces To Buy & Sell Social Media Accounts (Ranked). by John Gordon Social Tradia, Instagram. The Toronto-based firm boasts an easy-to-use website that categorizes accounts for sale based on niche and number of followers. One of the best things about this marketplace is that all transactions are carried out over well-established payment portals.
Freedom of Mind Resource Center podcast - Beware the Metaverse: Dr. Rand Waltzman discusses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet Rand Waltzman: “In a cognitive attack the whole point is that the target shouldn’t know they’re being attacked in order for it to be really effective. So that’s the whole trick to keep the target unaware because if the target becomes aware that they’re being attacked in this way, just by them becoming aware it significantly reduces the effect of the attack.”
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, 2013 - “System 1 has been shaped by evolution to provide a continuous assessment of the main problems that an organism must solve to survive: How are things going? Is there a threat or a major opportunity? Is everything normal? Should I approach or avoid? The questions are perhaps less urgent for a human in a city environment than for a gazelle on the savannah, aalenc and e: How , but we have inherited the neural mechanisms that evolved to provide ongoing assessments of threat level, and they have not been turned off. Situations are constantly evaluated as good or bad, requiring escape or permitting approach. Good mood and cognitive ease are the human equivalents of assessments of safety and familiarity.
Jessica Burn Notice https://medium.com/@watermelonpunch.com/jessica-burn-notice-188eea59efcb
Jessica Where There’s Smoke, and Mirrors https://medium.com/@watermelonpunch.com/jessica-where-theres-smoke-and-mirrors-e58e468459bd
Jessica Whatever Validates Your DoomScroll https://medium.com/@watermelonpunch.com/jessica-whatever-validates-your-doomscroll-cc97e6e37c65
Jessica Misfire https://medium.com/@watermelonpunch.com/jessica-misfire-3126de06d9ef
Jessica Overdose https://medium.com/@watermelonpunch.com/jessica-overdose-ebc5aee50543
You’ll Never Guess Jessica Wildfire’s First Niche Almost everyone who made it to the top had a terrible first year Philip S. Naudus The Writing Cooperative Nov 15, 2022 Writers who diversify will see a massive fluctuation in both follows and un-follows. When nobody knows you exist, this is exactly what you want because there’s nowhere to go but up. But once writers have somewhere between 5k and 10k followers, they start to worry about unsubscription rates. That’s when they begin niching down. Don’t believe me? Ask Jessica Wildfire. In her original profile bio, she described herself as having a “Ph.D. in sex jokes.” She wrote erotic satire. After writing every day for seven months, she had 61 followers — most of them were people who had followed her back. Only a handful of her stories had more than ten claps.
Georgetown Law Technology Review Social Media Algorithms: Why You See What You See Sang Ah Kim December 2017 Cite as: 2 GEO. L. TECH. REV. 147 (2017) During the analysis, the accumulated data can be organized into different categories that each reveal clues about what a user likes to see. Engagement itself is a simple indication of a user’s interest in a particular content. The more frequent the engagement, the stronger the association the algorithm will make between the user and that content.
The Internet Archive - Matt Binder on Twitter, 3:43 PM · Nov 13, 2022 it appears that Jimmy Dore has just confirmed that he is indeed libtard01
Knowledge Fight #958: More Like Jimmy Bore, Revisited 0 Aug 26, 2024
Sammy4723, anonymous pandemic influencer sock puppet account. Chloe Humbert · Apr 4, 2024 The account was outed for being inauthentic after a couple of other accounts documented the plagiarizing tweets of sammy4723 — tweets where the account had been copying tweets verbatim from other people’s accounts, without attribution and acting like they were their own. This is just a selection of the dozens of examples of copypasta tweets. Apparently the person or people running this account had a habit of troll replying using some ant fungus GIF meme.
Psychology Today - Giving Up: Informational Learned Helplessness. It’s exhausting when it’s hard to figure out what is true and what is false. December 23, 2021 | Susan A. Nolan, Ph.D., and Michael Kimball, Reviewed by Jessica Schrader The plodding repetition of conspiratorial lies can lead to “cognitive exhaustion.” But it goes deeper than that. Peter Pomerantsev, author of the book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, popularized the concept of “censorship by noise” in which governments “create confusion through information—and disinformation—overload.” In time, people become overwhelmed, and even cognitively debilitated, by the “onslaught of information, misinformation and conspiracy theories until [it] becomes almost impossible to separate fact from fiction, or trace an idea back to its source.” And so “censorship by noise,” particularly common in regions governed autocratically, leads people to experience crushing anxiety coupled with a markedly weakened motivation to fact-check anything anymore. They may then “like” or share information without critical review because they lack the energy and motivation to take the extra steps to check it out.
Big Tech Told Kids to Code. The Jobs Didn’t Follow. New York Times Podcasts Sep 29, 2025 And then in 2013, you get Hadti Parti, who is a well-known tech entrepreneur in Seattle, who had started his career at Microsoft and then became an investor in companies like Uber and Dropbox. He comes along and he starts a new nonprofit group called Code.org to promote coding in schools. And although it’s an education nonprofit, it acts very much like a startup with viral marketing methods. Like what? Well, the first thing they do to promote coding in schools is code.org made a video in 2013 starring the biggest tech titans of them all, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. You have these powerful billionaires making this pitch that anyone actually can learn to code. Any kid, whether you’re trying to make a lot of money or whether you just want to change the world, computer programming is incredibly empowering skill to learn. These are our heroic innovators and they’re rich and they’ve achieved the American dream and they’re telling every kid in America, you could be us if you just learn to code and by the way we’ll hire you.
Don’t wait for the influencers. Don’t Wait For Everybody - Episode 010 Chloe Humbert Sep 21, 2024 I don’t know if you saw my post describing the problem of the truth sandwich and how all of these Twitter influencers, these people who, you know, want to prove they’re debunking chops, debunking anti-vax stuff and whatever, and they get on Twitter and they do a Twitter thread and they lead with the lie. They lead with the lie. I mean, they do. It’s like, oh, I’m going to ask the question. Will this save me from COVID? Are the vaccines terrible? You know, and then they start with that. Like, they just start with the lie, the bad thing. And of course, it gets a bunch of anti-vax or whoever. botnets and troll farms to boost the shit out of it because it’s the first tweet is actually promoting the lie. And after I wrote that post, after Kristen Pathagani tricked me, she tricked me. In my Twitter scroll, I saw that she was posting the Florida study, that infamous now infamous Surgeon General Florida study. And, you know, she started out by just posting the study. And I thought, oh, my God, she’s pro-vax, a debunking blog. And I’m like, if she’s posting this, it must be true. Well, you know, of course, if you go down three tweets, you know, no, of course not. She’s debunking it. And I’m telling you, that freaked me out for a few days because it was like a brain worm it got in.
Don’t blame the messenger. Don’t Wait For Everybody - Episode 015 Chloe Humbert Dec 27, 2024
@GeorgeLakoff on Twitter & FrameLab podcast on soundcloud 1. Start with the truth. The first frame gets the advantage. 2. Indicate the lie. Avoid amplifying the specific language if possible. 3. Return to the truth. Always repeat truths more than lies. Hear more in Ep 14 of FrameLab w/@gilduran76
Six Degrees Psycho-Sensory Brand-Building: The Psychology of First Impressions by Frank Schab In fact, research tells us it only takes the duration of an eye blink to size up another person in terms of attractiveness and trustworthiness. Over the next three seconds, we form a more “complete” conclusion about a new acquaintance relating to their presumed personality and competence. Obviously, in that short a period of time, we have not really gotten to know the other person. Rather, we have used our cognitive biases and filters to form a “snap judgment” about someone, just as they have about us. Those judgments may or may not be accurate, but they endure.
The New Yorker Magazine: The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks. By Adrian Chen, July 27, 2016 The real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space. One activist recalled that a favorite tactic of the opposition was to make anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Then Kremlin trolls discovered how to make pro-Putin hashtags trend, and the symbolic nature of the action was killed. “The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,” the opposition activist Leonid Volkov told me.
Mere Exposure Effect, by Katja Falkenbach, Gleb Schaab, Oliver Pfau, Magdalena Ryfa, Bahadir Birkan The mere exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things or people that are more familiar to them than others. Repeated exposure increases familiarity. This effect is therefore also known as the familiarity effect. The earliest known research on the effect was conducted by Gustav Fechner in 1876. The effect was also documented by Edward Titchener and described as the glow of warmth one feels in the presence of something familiar.
Daniel Solove on Privacy, Technology, and the Rule of Law • The Tech Policy Press Podcast, Justin Hendrix / Aug 10, 2025 Daniel J. Solove: “There’s a lot of things with design that we know are deceptive, we know are harmful, and can be restricted or steered in the right direction. And that still leaves a gigantic sandbox with 80% of the space to do what they want, it’s just that we’re going to put some limits on that. So you mention free speech, and the first amendment and platforms and what do we do with that. I think it’s an incredibly complicated set of issues of how do we regulate what goes on in platforms. And it does involve free speech. But it also involves more than what we think is just pure speech because what we see on platforms is not just pure speech, it is speech that is architected. What we see on these platforms is influenced by algorithms behind the scenes that are designed to show us certain things and make other things harder to see. They’re designed to skew conversations in certain ways and to shape them. And so it is that we think that social media is our speech. But is it purely our speech? It’s really the speech of the companies who are actually taking what we’re saying and then using their algorithms to repackage it and push it out in ways that change the message, and direct the speech, and shape the speech. In fact the companies will admit to this, they will say that this is what they do. And so they say we are speakers, we want first amendment protections. So they run to the supreme court and say hey any type of regulation here is a violation of our right to free speech. We are speaking with these algorithms. The way we present stuff on social media and how we do it is our speech. They write this, this is their argument. Then though when it comes to instances where the algorithms do things that cause harm to people, then they turn around and say oh no it’s not our speech, we should be immune because it’s the speech of other people, it’s not us, someone else said it.”
Transcript:
MATT STRACKBEIN
I’m Matt Strackbein.
CHLOE HUMBERT
I’m Chloe Humbert.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Welcome to The Psych Grind.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Psych!
MATT STRACKBEIN
According to one cybersecurity company’s 2025 report, bad bots make up 37% of all internet traffic and, for the first time in a decade, automated traffic online accounts for 51% of the entire internet. Even though it may be increasingly difficult to tell if we are engaging with an automated bad bot or an actual human being,
we are still at risk of being trolled every time we log on. Sometimes trolling is a subtle annoyance, sometimes it is outright inflammatory, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like trolling at all. Does our impulse to engage with them matter based on how real a troll may or may not be? Human or bot?
Should we react to them at all? And if anyone out there thinks the answer may be, yes, then we’d love to hear from you. We’ve included references in the show notes, so if you have any questions while listening along, be sure and check those out.
And, of course, feel free to reach out to us with any questions, comments, or concerns. Now, on with the episode.
CHLOE HUMBERT
The buzz around bots versus sock puppet accounts versus trolls versus paid trolls is a little bit like the discourse around feds.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Feds, referring to federal agents.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yes, people will talk about fed posting when really they just mean trolling that veers into manipulation, usually some kind of hint of entrapment or maybe just condoning violence outright. And at the time of COINTELPRO, when federal agents did have moles in the civil rights movement, including in community groups who weren’t even doing any direct activism.
And that’s a real thing. But nowadays, fed has come to mean anyone trolling in a way that resembles an agent provocateur.
MATT STRACKBEIN
This sounds like something we’ll have to cover in more detail at some point.
CHLOE HUMBERT
But... Now we’re gonna talk about botnets, where it’s a reality that there are operations controlling scores of inauthentic accounts in a rather automated fashion. Some people run their own, but typically people pay for this as a service, So that’s how they can start a YouTube channel and it blows up within a few videos
and just happens to be saying what somebody selling a product or idea would want out there. Or they have an account on social media and every post they make almost instantly has a bunch of likes and reposts. of course, with the initial boost, the algorithm then takes over and says, oh, this is popular.
We’ll put it in front of more people. And if it’s genuinely interesting or, you know, whatever, it’ll take off from there. But there were times... Years back on Twitter where if you went back and looked at many of the initial retweets of a post,
it would be personal friends or colleagues of the person making the post and then a bunch of anonymous accounts that were just retweeting other accounts. So that’s literally a thing I’ve seen. A bunch of automated anonymous accounts set up to automatically engage with a certain real person’s content to boost it up. They’re entirely inauthentic accounts.
They’re not just some random person’s sock puppet account. They’re professionally run influence operations creating virality on the internet that’s essentially fake. There are some people who actually document a lot of the most obvious operations where they just put out the same information over and over and over again.
MATT STRACKBEIN
like New York Times bestselling author Ellen Hopkins, for example, who posted screenshots of three different verified Twitter accounts all tweeting the exact same thing. In this case, several posts, all on Twitter, were speaking as someone claiming, quote unquote, as a lifelong Democrat. They got Charlie Kirk all wrong. Again, all three posts were identical.
These accounts are pretending to be people who supposedly sat through a ton of Charlie Kirk’s debates and finally came away with the realization that he was misunderstood, which is insane because Kirk was an outright racist, open misogynist, and one of the top bad faith actors in political commentary. You cannot come away with a different angle than that.
without being completely wrong. And leading off with the whole lifelong Democrat thing shouldn’t matter at all in determining who is or isn’t acting in bad faith.
CHLOE HUMBERT
It’s leveraging identity, or what they think is identity. I’m not sure how strong an identity it is, but who knows how that taps into people.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Who knows how many of these bot accounts are out there swaying minds with the exact same messages on who knows how many platforms. If they reach even one person, it could have a substantial ripple effect. People could end up thinking he wasn’t such a bad person after all, which in turn validates the likes of J.D.
Vance, Donald Trump, and all of Fox News.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yeah, horrendous inauthentic behavior, trying to trick liberals using a high-profile murder. Real grisly stuff. So let’s talk instead about the Tesla tiny house spam botnet incident because it’s far less horrendous. I can’t even believe I’m saying this about anything connected to Elon Musk. That’s really saying something, but...
At least it didn’t seem like it was actually accomplishing grave harm to people. I found out about it from a Substack post in August 2025 by someone who tracks a lot of these fake accounts on social media and posts examples of them on their Substack.
This person did a great job describing the creepy images posted to social media. So I’ll read a bit from the description of the post. It had a headline, The Curious Case of the Tesla Tiny House Spam. Subtitle, no, Elon Musk is not selling tiny houses for a few thousand dollars each.
And the post goes on, quote, There is in fact no such product as a Tesla tiny house. But that hasn’t stopped some of the posts in question from going viral, particularly on Facebook. Unsurprisingly, most of the posts are from large generative AI content farm accounts, many of which have been repeatedly renamed.
The Tesla tiny house posts are all extremely similar, consisting of AI-generated images of imaginary high-tech homes, generally accompanied by a caption mentioning the alleged price of the non-existent domicile. The prices are often unrealistically low for U.S. homes, even for houses as small as those depicted. The houses in the images are somewhat surreal and resemble structures from science
fiction films. The Tesla tiny house meme is not limited to Facebook. Variations on the concept have been popping up with increasing frequency on a variety of platforms, including YouTube and X, unquote.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Was it ever explained what the point was for all the fake ads for tiny Tesla houses? What purpose did this serve?
CHLOE HUMBERT
Well, we may never know for sure. But the two reasons that come to mind for me immediately is first that it’s most likely a click farm of some sort. The accounts doing it were known click farm accounts. That’s where links drive clicks to a page with lots of advertising. So it’s driving revenue. It’s making money for somebody.
People love to look at tiny homes and find out if they can see what they look like inside. It’s a curiosity. it seems like the only people who don’t enjoy looking at real estate are people who are shopping for a house. Then it’s more frustrating than fun.
But maybe I’m, you know, revealing too much about my own experience. But another possible motivation for something so clickbaity and weird would be that it was meant as a decoy. There are services, for example, to clean up your internet presence and And I don’t mean just getting yourself off of a people search. That’s pretty straightforward.
There are services that will manipulate internet searches so that most people won’t find whatever unpleasant stuff is out there about you, at least not as easily. So one tactic is to muddy the SEO, the search engine optimization, with bullshit. So a bunch of nonsense or only what the person wants you to find comes up within
the first few pages of the results. in the search and most people won’t go further because who has time for that right most people just do a cursory search and if that’s the case what’s going on it’s actually kind of ham fisted but the reason I mention it is because it’s Elon Musk
It doesn’t necessarily seem like something he wouldn’t do. But who knows? If I was a gambler, I’d bet on the click farm explanation. They were leveraging the popularity of tiny home videos with the clickbait nature of all things Elon Musk. But it’s true. People with various agendas utilize these types of services. Businesses, advertisers, political parties, celebrities,
PR firms, and outright scammers and criminals and profiteers. Like the Alt-National Park account comes to mind. They’re selling merch by making people believe they are supporting park workers or something. And someone has to debunk their QAnon you know, stuff every couple of months. They persist, though.
They’re usually just called social media consultants who do this for other people or digital marketing services. I have seen a lot of miscellaneous services in the expense reports of nonprofit organizations that probably involve these types of services. I’m a retired union member, and I’m very pro-labor. I support unions and workers organizing,
but many of the big unions also use these types of operations and hire these types of services. There are specifically a class of influencers who are specifically labor influencers, and that’s all they do is promote unions, promote union messaging, etc.,
MATT STRACKBEIN
Now, is that a bad thing? Wouldn’t promoting unions be a good thing? And aren’t they just using the media situation and services that are available? Like, we should be promoting unions all the time everywhere, right?
CHLOE HUMBERT
I want to see unions and labor issues promoted everywhere. But there are drawbacks to inauthentic activities that could come across as deceptive and therefore undermine the cause. And it also can be leveraged in ways that I think a lot of people might not see as fair or worker-centered. So in the UAW,
which I know people who are members in the UAW, pro-union, pro-labor union members, and a lot of things have gone on with Shawn Fain, and that’s a separate issue. So I’m not going to go into that. But. I think this is a good illustration about how these operations, how networks and inauthentic boosting or suppression can occur online,
making it not a public square. It’s not a town square. It’s not even like an open mic night where everyone can conceivably get in line and be heard. There are people cutting the line. There are people gatekeeping. There are people doing suppression.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Like shadow banning.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Shadow banning is a form of suppression and gatekeeping. Sometimes shadow banning is deliberate. Sometimes it’s a result of automated systems and how they’re set up.
MATT STRACKBEIN
And there’s another thing we’ll have to drill down on at some point.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Definitely. But now let’s zero in on the boosting and the suppression generally happening. I subscribe to Payday Report, which is run by Mike Elk, who is a reporter who focuses on labor issues nationally and geopolitically. And last year, I got a newsletter headline from him, and the headline was,
UAW staff strike ignored as labor influencers fear losing UAW’s social media reach.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Okay. So here’s a good example of the power of social media, but also why that power can be really bad. The article says, quote, It’s strike day two and we are angry and determined to make this place better for staff organizers and the members we organize alongside. Cut our pay, cut our healthcare. We are not going away.
Given the high-profile media attention on UAW President Shawn Fain and the fact that the strike is occurring in the media hub of New York City, you would think every labor reporter in the country would be covering this. But however, outside of the Payday Report, no other labor reporter or labor publication has covered the strike. So,
Why would so many labor journalists ignore this story of hypocrisy by the UAW president, Shawn Fain? They need the social media engine of the UAW in order to make their work go viral.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Voila, there it is. Labor journalists ignored the story because they need the UAW’s social media network to make their work go viral. This is a form of access journalism, which is a whole other thing, too.
MATT STRACKBEIN
So the union or the union president has a lot of power over who sees what and who knows about what.
CHLOE HUMBERT
or maybe at least the consultants who run these social media operations, seem to have a lot of power and a lot of leverage, back and forth with the union. A report from six months later about the UAW president in Payday Report said, quote, The Federal Monitor’s report released yesterday raises troubling questions about
UAW’s approval of no-bid contracts to D.C. political consulting firms in violation of the federal consent decree, which requires UAW to seek three bids for each contract, unquote. And the consulting firms, one of them was definitely some kind of influencer PR operation.
MATT STRACKBEIN
So it sounds like there’s a lot going on there, but zeroing in on the media power aspect of this, it may be done for the greater good at times, but it’s also problematic at times. Not everyone is going to be happy with how the discourse gets manipulated.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Right, because we need bottom-up unions, and this goes against that. And sometimes I’ve seen labor influencers online feeding the flames of pointless rifts between labor, disability justice, and climate activism. And these are movements who should have considerable overlap and probably would.
MATT STRACKBEIN
divide and conquer.
CHLOE HUMBERT
It works out well for the people opposed to all three because we threaten their industry interests. And I say we because I consider myself right at the intersection of all three of those. I’m a public health advocate. I’m a union member. I’m disabled. And that probably makes me more hyper aware of when this type of divisiveness comes
up because I immediately recognize that I’m having different issues of my own being pitted against each other when, in fact, I see them as melded into one because they’re all related for me. I’m not claiming that these influencers are making money playing both sides, though I’m sure there are operatives that play both sides,
taking money from whoever will pay them. Those people exist. But I think in most cases, this is just an unfortunate side effect of chasing clicks as a priority, as a business model. If your priority is always keeping yourself viral and keeping your content viral, if that’s your number one priority,
then you will engage in controversy even to the detriment of the movements you’re purportedly hired to help. a lot of that controversy divides people who would otherwise be stronger together coordinating instead of creating bad feelings and bad faith on the internet, mixing it up and wasting everybody’s time. But I guess it’s entertaining and compelling.
MATT STRACKBEIN
You know how so-called reality TV isn’t reality at all? That’s what most online content is when it comes to politics. It may feel real, but it’s skewed in a way that gets the most clicks. there’s real news being reported every minute, but there’s also a drama industrial complex of sorts at play online.
Whether fighting with the other side or what they call infighting, it all boils down to arguing, which translates to most of us as drama, and that gets clicks.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Right, the infighting. Maybe it’s juicier if it’s a new twist, not the same old Republican and Democrats. Though I have to say there seems to be even more younger generations coming up who enjoy listening to Christians debating atheists, and there’s literally nothing new there.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Drama is something we don’t want in our personal lives, but we don’t necessarily mind when it’s someone else’s life. OMG, it’s so controversial.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Well, I’ve known some people who maybe did want it in their own lives. especially when people have lots of responsibilities, it’s rather like watching hobby YouTube videos. They’re popular because if you’re busy and tired, you can watch somebody else do something. I don’t know if that’s even benign necessarily,
but I’m thinking about how popular the soap operas have always been.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Like most good storytelling, the crisis or the dramatic event at the story’s peak drives our level of engagement. So it may be no surprise that the majority of news and commentary out there capitalizes on the drama. The difference being, in your favorite book or movie, the drama eventually ends and there’s an outcome or resolution, some new normal.
But the algorithm feeds off of drama and controversy. And that means there’s likely no end in sight. Keeping in mind, we could all just log off whenever we want to. There are more and newer content creators coming online all the time. And of course, they are hyper-focused on all of those bad faith ways of getting clicks because
it’s been going on long enough now that people can see how the monetization and influence game is played. Some use the drama as the hook, the red meat that comes with a side of veggies, while others more and more serve up only drama, commentary on drama and their own manufactured arguments with other content creators.
It takes on said drama. And so it goes, it never stops. Why won’t somebody make it stop? And don’t you know, now the viewers aren’t just subscribing to drama, but they are divided into camps. And that division versus, say, organizing may not be the worst part.
The worst part could be that people are increasingly less interested in the news, the good stuff. And instead, they are purely engaged in the bottomless pit of drama. Because clicks and views are the thing being monetized, not the commentary or reporting itself, but the perceived so-called reality that drives the clicks and the views. And of course,
nobody wants to tell you about this because the whole thing at least partly relies on us not realizing what’s going on, not realizing that it’s inauthentic or manufactured. The stamp of approval has to look real. And when you find out that you’ve had something hidden from you, especially hidden in plain sight,
it’s going to make people angry when they do realize. No one wants to be duped. So of course, no one likes realizing that they’ve been duped.
CHLOE HUMBERT
this reminds me of something I heard cognitive security expert Rand Waltzman say a few years ago on a podcast, that in a cognitive attack, the target shouldn’t even realize they’re being attacked for it to work. Because as soon as the target becomes aware they’re being attacked, it reduces the effectiveness of the attack.
MATT STRACKBEIN
People stop and think and notice.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Right. And that’s something else to address. The whole system one, system two thing from the book Thinking Fast and Slow. But getting back to this, often you won’t get informed about how stuff works because the people who are involved aren’t doing any whistleblowing because this is their profession. They’re in it.
Or it’s a sideline or whatever they’re doing. It’s a profit center running these PR operations.
MATT STRACKBEIN
At the end of the day, the sad truth is that the best way for any streamer or social media politico to be successful monetarily is to invest in the drama at some point. And when it comes to the more anonymous content creators and influencers, people buy and sell those accounts.
You don’t hear about this in the mainstream media, but in the marketing press, it’s openly talked about.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Right. In the professional realm you will hear about it because they’re talking about it, but they don’t want the targets to know. And sometimes you can tell that this is going on. If your favorite animal, cartoon character, anonymous influencer account that’s wildly popular starts pivoting in a weird for example. I’ve seen it happen.
I have suspected it many times.
MATT STRACKBEIN
This is all about trust to me. If there’s an account that while it may be public facing, even though there’s no actual person or face associated with it, and that account has a following of like hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, a lot of those people who were fans of the account’s original content suddenly
start talking about something else, maybe pushing a particular product or political opinion because the popular account is leading a pivot. The online politico or whatever has built a platform. But they’ve also established trust. And I have to assume that that trust came from absorbing the content,
but also the growing number of followers has got to have something to do with it. Like, why else? would there be a willingness to trust the account even after an obvious pivot? Because the pivot didn’t happen before the platform reached a certain size. And that size has real value.
And that’s the clue to what’s really been going on. Either the intent was to grow the platform to a point where the pivot could have an instant follower, Or, and this may sound suddenly more realistic, the accounts have been traded. The platform was actually sold. And so it isn’t actually a pivot at all.
It’s actually a new platform without ever announcing it out loud. And that is a violation of trust that may have been misplaced to start with.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yeah, it’s hard for followers to pivot themselves once they feel fondly towards some influencer account. Or maybe it’s just because most of what they still say they agree with, and there’s something satisfying about seeing a big account say what you think, and it makes you feel validated.
The stamp of approval is a real influential aspect of the influencer’s ability to leverage the power to influence people. I’ve had many, many people insist upon following sketchy influencers or straight-up dodgy accounts because they would say very earnestly, most of what they say is good. I’ve heard that said about the prolific COVID substack influencer.
I’ll just call her Jessica Pants on Fire. And I’ve debunked a lot of her claims because she would just do this dizzying mix of pro-COVID prevention content. But that was also vaguely hinting at anti-vax ideas. Um. pushing dubious, unproven COVID product promotion. And most people thought she was just a real regular person who was just worried
about COVID and trying to keep her kids safe. And that may be true. But then when informed, you know, that she was in fact a very successful influencer predating the pandemic by years, and nobody had any real information to confirm her credentials or her identity or her claimed situation,
um she wrote as if she was in the united states but nobody could really say for sure if she was in the united states i i heard that in fact she was not in the united states and if you don’t know if the person is actually a person or you know
if they’re real if they’re really where they say they are if they are who they are uh a dozen people could be behind this persona doing the writing i don’t have time to read everything and decide This influencer puts out a lot of content. I just read the posts that people would come to me with,
and ask me, have you seen this? And then I’d have to debunk, you know, the more egregious stuff. But most people don’t have the time to see everything someone’s putting out on social media. You’ll never see every post. That’s the rub, right?
MATT STRACKBEIN
Social media has a way of making sure people are only exposed to what they will readily want to see.
CHLOE HUMBERT
It’s by design. And the designers of the algorithms and the people who’ve worked for these platforms have openly stated it’s by design to show people what they want to see. So in most cases, people just read what they want to read and are shocked to find out that the person has been, for example,
repeating right-wing anti-vax talking points. But then they’ll still say, well, most of the time she says good things. Yes, and a broken clock is wrong most of the day. You wouldn’t recommend it as a timepiece, right? But of course, this writer has a knack for really shining on the readers, making people feel special.
And that’s the secret sauce of influence and persuasion. But that’s a whole other can of worms. I guess we can open that at a separate time.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Something else we’ll want to drill down on more later.
CHLOE HUMBERT
The point is that why we even know the name or rather the pseudonym of this person, because they’ve been a successful medium influencer for maybe close to a decade. She started out in erotica and has dabbled in sort of red-brown politics. But most people following for the COVID wellness content have no idea about that stuff.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Because of the way everyone is comfortably in a silo.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Info cocoons, if you will. Or even echo chambers. Hmm. And why this is relevant is because this is essentially a sock puppet influencer. We don’t know who it is, but it’s not simply a pre-programmed bot. And a lot of people have sock puppet accounts. Every once in a while,
someone gets caught replying to their own tweets with sycophantic responses from their alt accounts. Sock puppet accounts they use to boost themselves personally with alter ego fake personas.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Like when Jimmy Dore was exposed by Matt Binder for using an alt account on Twitter called, forgive the expression, Libtard01.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Good gravy.
MATT STRACKBEIN
In which he referred to the Humanist Report as the white liberal Malcolm X warned us about. And when he was exposed... He admitted it under the exact same burner account. But up until the point that Binder nailed him, the account existed purely to promote and defend Jimmy Dore.
Like someone would say something negative about him and he’d use this fake account of his to immediately defend himself. But as if it were just some diehard fan, it is so pathetic.
CHLOE HUMBERT
I’m still about oh that name choice.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Yeah, I know. A comedian, don’t you know? by the way, is what I’d call a controversial figure who has essentially left the left in a manner that seems like an attempt to harm the progressive movement while also propping himself up as a truth teller. Nothing undoes that notion more than anonymously stirring up online drama through a
thinly veiled alt Twitter account using the same phrasing and language as your actual account.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Well, that dude’s definitely left the left. If he was ever on the left, he’s hanging out with decidedly right-wing since. He’s done events with Alex Jones. I only even know this because of listening to a Knowledge Fight podcast, which covers Alex Jones. And Jimmy Dore had Alex Jones on his show during the DNC on Rumble,
and they were both hand-wringing about conspiracy fictions. And Jimmy Dore asks... If Alex Jones has inside information on, the deep state, trying to ramp up COVID and fear about Mpox and bird flu and whatever. And then, of course, Alex Jones hits the fan favorite with the, quote, unquote, the shots.
I don’t know why anyone is asking Alex Jones for inside information on anything other than maybe for the inside dope on an especially trashed up rabbit hole. But anyway, I think Matt Yglesias was also suspected of having an alt account. And it wasn’t that people found the alt.
It was that he replied himself with his own same account as if he was praising himself. And I think he waved it away as if it was normal to do that and refer to himself, like reply to himself, referring to himself in the third person. Well, who knows? Maybe it is normal for him.
But alts are definitely a thing is what I’m saying.
MATT STRACKBEIN
There are many more instances out there, too, where people suspect so-and-so is using a specific alt account in their own favor. Whether you can prove it or not, it’s definitely a thing that goes on.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yeah, it’s not a maybe. It’s happening. I found this prolific and very popular, I guess, sock puppet account on Twitter a few years ago with the handle Sammy4723. And, well, it was behaving inauthentically.
MATT STRACKBEIN
That seems like an understatement after reading your account on the account. From the Medium blog post, quote, the account was outed for being inauthentic after a couple of other accounts documented the plagiarizing tweets of Sammy4723. Tweets where the account had been copying tweets verbatim from other people’s accounts without attribution and acting like they were their own.
This is just a selection of a dozen of examples of copy paste tweets. Apparently, the person or people running this account had a habit of troll replying using some ant fungus gif meme, unquote. The tweets that were pointed out with screenshots showing the Sammy4723 account just outright copying and pasting all these other posts
they did so without changing a single word, but they adjusted some of the spacing or added ellipses and hit return now and then. In terms of making someone’s words your own, it’s minimal effort to say the least.
CHLOE HUMBERT
so this account’s posts were mostly copying tweets verbatim from other accounts without attribution, other real accounts of real people. It wasn’t a case like the Tesla tiny homes type situation where just a bunch of bots were putting out the same posts verbatim. This was one anonymous troll stealing content off random people. Yeah.
that I guess they thought would go viral. The weird thing, what I thought was weird at the time, back in 2022, but not really so much now, was that only about half of the people who were warned about this account’s behavior actually unsubscribed or unfollowed. They would just say they liked the account leave me alone.
I was the asshole for mentioning it, in other words. someone with a substantial platform, I actually had a private DM conversation with them about it. They unfollowed, and I think at least acted like they found the inauthentic behavior off-putting, or at least inappropriate.
And I know they unfollowed because I’d looked at the time, and the person was definitely in big COVID topic DM groups. So they must have heard about people discovering the inauthentic behavior again in 2023. Words gets around about stuff like this among big shots in the same milieu.
But here it was, 2024, and I found them in the following list of this account again. So somehow they wound up re-following, though they knew the account was inauthentic. And even for troll accounts, it’s actually considered bad form to copy other people’s posts verbatim. They also posted other things,
but they did copy and paste other people’s tweets often enough to get caught repeatedly and denounced.
MATT STRACKBEIN
not only is plagiarism apparently a socially acceptable form of online discourse, but folks are apparently fine with larger inauthentic accounts amplifying someone else’s post because of why media reach. I’m not I’m not sure this is the best analogy, but it’s like you and I are walking down the street and one of us says something
profound and a billboard overhead magically displays those same words with some random person or company taking credit for it. that’s not authentic, people tell me to shut up because I’m not a billboard visible from several blocks away.
CHLOE HUMBERT
It just reminds me, it seems like something that would have been in a Terry Gilliam film. It’s really ridiculous, but that kind of is what is happening.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Yeah, and all these people were still following in 2024 when the account was now reposting Lincoln Project stuff about Trump.
CHLOE HUMBERT
and those people following had big accounts themselves, in many cases much, much bigger than the Sammy4723 account. And I don’t think there’s one I would have expected to be a fan of the Lincoln Project, for example. At least if you were in Canada, the UK, maybe Australia, too. It was just incongruent.
So it’s possible the account was sold or passed off for different purposes over the years. I went back to the history of this account. I was able to find the person had revealed another account some years in the past. And I looked at that and that account had a profile picture that That looked authentic.
It had what looked like a snapshot of the person with a pet. It looked like a profile pic a real person might have. I think they were wearing sunglasses or something where I couldn’t have possibly identified them. It’s possible it was just somebody’s alt account or that the account started out as
a real person being anonymous and then they sold it and it started to get passed around. It could be an alt account of somebody who was following. People never like to hear their faves are fake. People just don’t take the news well, even when it’s obvious people’s first impulse is to just not want to believe it’s true.
So that’s why people keep following. And also we’ve been trained to feel awkward about spotting inauthentic coordinated behavior. Yeah. I’m not sure why that is. We may have to go into that further at some point. But So I had to start bookmarking articles about it several years ago because people just wouldn’t believe me.
They’d tell me I was a conspiracy theorist, which I guess I am in a way. Of course, real conspiracies are essentially hidden by disinformation operations flooding the zone with wacky conspiracy theories. I mean, And fiction. It’s censorship by noise. This is a known thing.
So there are genuinely people who don’t realize that there are fake accounts on social media. If you’re extremely online, of course, you already know about this, but I have met people who are online and do not realize there are fake accounts on social media.
And then I’d show them how much there is about it in the marketing press. if you don’t realize that sounds silly, it sounds absolutely insane that there are thousands or millions of inauthentic fake accounts on social media. Gamers call them NPCs. And that’s essentially it. We’re being gamed.
MATT STRACKBEIN
NPC, non-player character, bystanders, in other words. But I think you could unfairly accuse anyone of being a conspiracy theorist when the information they present isn’t widely known or talked about. It’s not an accurate label, but that’s why we all need to be aware of these situations online, because there is no conspiracy.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Or the conspiracy is real and it’s hiding in plain sight. But knowing this is going on has a way of ruining the internet for a lot of people. And frankly, it can cost lives in some situations. And obviously, it’s making politics demented. So yes, it’s a thing.
I’ll quote from one of those reports I bookmarked several years ago that was on a website called Tribal Growth. The headline from 2021 was, I think, seven best marketing marketplaces to buy and sell social media accounts ranked. So right there, seven best suggests there are quite a few more places to buy and sell social media accounts.
And the article says, quote, the Toronto-based firm boasts an easy-to-use website that categorizes accounts for sale based on niche and number of followers. One of the best things about this marketplace is that all transactions are carried out over well-established payment portals, unquote. And of course, the fact is that with all these trolls online, it muddies the waters,
it floods the zone, some might say, but that’s another topic entirely too.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Yeah, like dead internet theory where it’s just a bunch of bots posting and liking each other’s fake content.
CHLOE HUMBERT
I’m sure that there are some social media feeds that are exactly that, but like just fake following fake, but obviously it’s not the entirety of the internet. Though if it gets flooded with enough crap, people are going to start checking out of the internet. I do think that that’s the case.
There’s already been a move within my adult lifetime from where the internet use was at first a nerdy thing or an affluent thing. And then there was a period where people seemed to view the internet as their secret life, thus the term IRL in real life. as opposed to being online. Then the backlash and rude awakenings came.
I remember blogging 20 years ago about people who were blogging and were terribly confused about this. In 2002, I wrote, there seems to be a growing number of people who really seem to believe that if they bring their real-life information and opinions onto the internet, that it is automatically protected in some kind of stasis field of fantasy.
impervious to and shield it from their offline life. This mentality is exhibited in ReadMe, a blogger’s disclaimer, where the author of the piece states that web surfers are to, quote, view weblogs as online journals, no less sacred than a diary hidden between the mattresses. Remember, this is the writer’s outlet, unquote.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Let’s not skip over the moment in Internet history where grandparents treated the whole thing as digital scrapbooking or something, only to become the perfect users for scammers to go after. They’re just, having fun, sharing pictures of cats and grandchildren while stepping directly into the line of so to speak, for bots and trolls.
CHLOE HUMBERT
But it was cool to be on the Internet. It was cool to be in tech. It was pushed heavily. The New York Times had a recent podcast about that with Natasha Singers tracing some of the history that where these tech investors had nonprofits to lobby for coding in schools in order to,
glut the market with tech workers who would fight for the jobs. And they did it with heavy PR and influencing boards of education. And... Even up until recently, it was cool to be posting on social media. But over the past few years, there’s been a growing discontent with the whole scene.
There was a survey out of the UK where the results were that a lot of youths said they preferred there was no internet at all. And there’s definitely a stigma about overuse of social media or screen time or being extremely online, quote unquote. It’s recognized that it’s not without side effects and potential harms now,
but it wasn’t always like that. Sure, there were always people who overused the Internet. I had a friend in the 1990s who was on the Internet before I was. was on the Internet at home, and I still remember thinking they were a little compulsive about it, though probably no more than most of us,
or many of us at least, are with our phones. And we have those with us everywhere now. And he was just an early adopter.
MATT STRACKBEIN
To be fair, early adopters had to add wait time for dial-up. So it makes sense they’d be online a little too much. But going back to the earlier days of the Internet, The idea that you don’t feed the trolls goes way back.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yeah, I’m pretty sure this dates back to IRC and Usenet and email listservs, forums back then. There was moderation even in blog comments. Of course, people would sometimes game the rules. And so people would call those people trolls. And the moderators, real humans, would have a hard time being fair. And, you know,
so it was hard for them to give people the boot if they were skirting around the edges.
MATT STRACKBEIN
They’re called edge lords in some cases, and they say and do things that go right up to the brink of crossing the line with their rhetoric and interactions. Mods don’t always know how to react because moderating doesn’t mean strictly banning someone from a chat or comment section.
It’s also about making sure people are treated fairly and that even divisive opinions have a place in conversations online. But you get these jerks, now likely not even a real jerk, who distort good advice like touching grass as an insult. Here’s something you don’t like. Tell them to go touch grass. Versus...
just suggesting maybe someone has been online a bit too much and should give an issue or an argument some space for decompression. It’s like within the edgelord’s code to twist everything into someone else’s overreaching form of political correctness. The real goal isn’t always to be edgy necessarily,
but just to just keep pulling everyone else down into the muck of online culture. Meanwhile, the poor moderators are watching the trolls and anyone and everyone who feels they should rightly so push back on them, which is often just taking the bait.
CHLOE HUMBERT
It’s just like I’ve read that the job of a paid troll is just to make a forum so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it. That’s a quote according to Leonid Bolkov, quoted in The New Yorker in 2016. But back in the earlier days of the Internet,
people came to see it as a collective duty online to... have a stance of don’t field the trolls because there were humans in the loop doing moderating. Things weren’t automated beyond maybe a censor word list.
MATT STRACKBEIN
This strategy seemed to work better back in the early Internet before algorithms on social media incentivized feeding the trolls. It’s less effective today, although in many situations it’s probably still good policy in general where possible.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yeah, not giving a platform to a troublemaker is... Only possible in a vertically organized situation where the people at the top of the decision-making process actually care to do that. And that’s clearly not the case for those in charge of the largest social media platforms.
MATT STRACKBEIN
It’s undeniable that nowadays clickbait and outrage are strategically deployed and boosted for a number of reasons. And even after the fact, when people are already getting taken for a ride, people are still concerned about giving it air and maybe helping to promote bad misinformation, or crap products to even more people.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Because of all the other disincentives, it’s hard to pre-bunk these things even. But pre-bunking is actually an effective way to oppose disinformation campaigns and spread misinformation because the people who might boost it or spread it unwittingly or unintentionally are forewarned and will therefore be able to spot it easier. And stuff gets
spread a lot by the unwitting so to notice it that it’s problematic or untrue before hitting the button to send it forward um that’s part of the strategy behind the truth sandwich where if you’re debunking something you start with the truth because that’s what people remember the first thing out and then you debunk the lie
and then you mention the truth thing again and that’s what makes it like a sandwich
MATT STRACKBEIN
I don’t like truth sandwich as a term. It’s too much like nothing burger, which I don’t know. Don’t make me think of food in these situations because it’s unappetizing. But I digress and I get it.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Well, you can just say lead with the truth. That’s usually what I say. Don’t lead with the lie. It’s an effective strategy to start with what you want someone to remember. Start with the truth. But unfortunately, it won’t get you as many clicks and dopamine hits on social media. Leading with an outrageous claim is what gets attention.
even from detractors. It unfortunately promotes the bad information, reinforcing the concepts or ideas, and it leverages the mere exposure effect.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Unfortunately, all the way things are, you know, set up in social media algorithms, SEO on the internet, the attention economy in media, everything is disincentivizing the best ways of communication.
CHLOE HUMBERT
So even people trying to be good science communicators fall into deep, dark pitfalls, having efforts perverted by a deranged media ecosystem that’s rife with social media platform algorithms.
MATT STRACKBEIN
There are a lot of other media pitfalls we’ll have to go into later.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Yeah, and the social media tricks and traps that utilize the trolls and these operations.
MATT STRACKBEIN
Free speech is not always free speech.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Right, but so are we done here for now?
MATT STRACKBEIN
You’re making the rules. You’re setting the itinerary. You tell me.
CHLOE HUMBERT
Oh. Oh, okay.
