Checking Up On the AMcGimpsey14 BotNet
A Series on Misinformation, Disinformation and Subterfuge
Awhile back I found a rather old test botnet after unmasking the Rebekah Jones cyberstalker and criminal psychopath Max Nordau I thought was interesting. The 2009 tester network automated roughly 50K accounts to each follow back a smaller subset of bots within, maxing out the daily follows at just over 125 resulting in those main socks having around 50K followers still more than a decade later. I saved one screenshot example August 8, shown here below.
Elon Musk has been adamant that he was going to reduce or rid bots with some changes with changes made last weekend. Here below is that same abandoned bot account as shown above.
Normally I get to report on the lies of various bad actors like Susan Portnoy, Mike Rothschild or Rocco Castoro. This is one of those rare exceptions I see something that was unexpectedly truthful. Musk’s changes are doing something to botnets, at least older ones, that he said he would have done.
One spoken truth out of hundreds of lies and racist messaging is not a redemption arc, yet will be something Elon wants and will use as a narrative.
Why is this a good thing:
The internal changes made appear to be removing many historic empty accounts with no tweets. Some of those types of accounts wound up later reconstituted as fakes used to deceive people like Winkie_doo, Hit_Lisssy, ouroboredom working within a sock-net of Single Purpose Hate Accounts and so forth connected to both Yonder and theNoNews networks.
Assuming the changes will continue scanning the directory of billions of accounts for similar profiled accounts and thus reduce the amount of older minted held in reserve empty accounts that the hate mongers I have highlighted occasionally activate and weaponize.
This also proves that not all the remaining engineers “held” by Twitler are busy with programming content feed to push radicalization material into timelines and breaking account followings secretly (that is going on according to some prominent users like Don Winslow).
Why this doesn’t matter:
Good people won’t use Twitler at all in the near future because it is a radicalization engine promoting Supremacy, misogyny, antisemitism, pornography, stochastic terrorism, conspiracy to effectively desensitize its user bases over political violence and genocide. Those things aren’t even hidden, sent out by the chief Twit himself.
Secondly, this particular coding is going to likely hit only older stagnant accounts held in abandoned botnets initially and might be getting done in lieu of monitoring new botnets.
Continued
The scripting also so far isn’t clearing out recently built botnets, or at least hasn’t as yet.
This isn’t my defending Elon or anything, simply noting that the amount of data these bot-killing scripts would need to sift through is enormous with billions of accounts and probably minimal server bandwidth dedicated to the task to speed it along. This does create a larger problem though. The bots getting launched today compared to the ones a decade ago have different purposes.
In 2009 most bots were amplifying advertisement. Today’s bots do so to push content. With a prominent Nazi beckoning other like-minded individuals to his platform, the type of content of the botnets they will bring with them likely presents national security threats such as promoting more domestic terrorism.
Frankly, Congress needs to use any and all kill switches on Twitter now.