Bought Old Socks With Holes in Them

A Series on Misinformation, Disinformation and Subterfuge

There are SO many inauthentic accounts operating on Twitter within the various trolling networks, I thought it might be fun to look at a couple more of the bought socks, empty accounts acquired with a long ago creation date repurposed for coordinated social media influence campaigns.

This account created March 2009 was bought mid-2020 as evidenced by this second tweet (first was a deleted retweet). The easiest way to detect if an old account is authentic or not is to check the Photos & Videos tab, scroll to the end, and see what that date is. Normal people at least tweet a GIF, photo or Meme within the first month of an account creation, so a decade gap is a red flag.

Here is a screenshot of its followers starting at the second position. All these sock accounts are the same criminal network that takes paid contracts to inflict trauma on people on behalf of mostly rightwing political campaigns, based on my research.

And this other totally bogus one, created June 2016.

It was likely purchased around the same time, July 2020 as evidence by its first tweet in the same section.

Or this garbage account, created September 2010.

And bought before May of 2020. If this is the same batched purchase, that moves up the time frame regarding when the org first bought these.

Because this is one of the more active single purpose hate accounts in charting, we’ll throw in a Chirpty for added measure.

Next up is this 2009 one.

Bought likely in the same batch, with first markers indicating before July 2020.

And this goofy 2009 one, activated just this year.

Another one, made in 2011, weaponized October 2020.

These types of socks are far more likely to come off to a victim as an authentic person given the old creation date. If Twitter wasn’t complicit in traumatizing the network’s victims, they would remove all of the above single purpose multi account hate network, as well as every empty/abandoned account that can be weaponized later off from the platform.

But Twitter isn’t about protecting people, is it?