someone is wrong on the internet

Occasional Debunkings

[ms-disinformation]

Lol I just followed up on a bunch of blogs that I'd been tracking and it's very funny to me that this is one of the last posts from an account that many people were very convinced was a sincere activist:

anyway, weird that so many of the blogs I was tracking were started from November 7th to 20th 2017 and then also stopped posting from May 5th to 11th 2020.

(and i mean my life imploded in May 2020 too, but not so much that me and eight of my friends completely dropped off of a website we'd been heavily posting on daily for three years without a single 'hey i'm over at mastodon now')

Also very weird that these extremely popular, influential bloggers who talked so much about inequality, police violence, and white supremacy in the US just flat dropped their major platforms and never came back to talk about the popular antiracist, antipolice uprisings after George Floyd was murdered by cops in 2020.

Anyway. Since these accounts seem to be fully abandoned at this point maybe I can now get around to doing the full analysis I had been putting off, though going through every single blog, at least one of which has 30k posts, sounds terrible. Maybe I'll just look at the posts for the last week the blogs existed.

[algorithmist]

[ms-demeanor]

got really annoyed with someone and scrolled through his entire blog reporting him for TOS violations (lotta hate speech in there plus or minus a few videos of people getting shot in the head) and his very first post was a list of all the nearly identical URLs he'd had deactivated for hate speech in the past.

So now I'm just gonna go ahead and create an account for all the other permutations of that username, which i will dutifully use to reblog memes so that it's not just URL squatting.

This all could have been avoided for the low, low cost of not being a fascist and annoying me.

[ms-demeanor]

Also: Yes, I am triggered. Yes, I am a loser. Yes, this was the best use of my time. Yes, I am mad.

I have just had to scroll through so many images of people dying among other bullshit all because your deactivated ass wanted to leave the most junior high possible reply on a post and your header just straight up had nazis in it.

Also fun fact: fascist tumblr all skips leg day and they're all dehydrated because they value abs and vascularity more than they value their own ability to function.

[ms-demeanor]

There's a part of me that wants to document the process of identifying blogs like this from first contact through to archiving/reporting through to finding deleted versions. There's another part of me that says "remember when you found a strong network of ten blogs which shared images from the same device, presented provable misinformation regularly, and you then documented all of that, and all that happened was several people accusing you of being a liberal calling leftists bots, and MANY liberals using your data points incorrectly to suggest that regular ass leftists were bots?"

I'd like to do more stuff in that space but I have chosen to put "tumblr-specific extremist or misinformation research" on the high shelf until people can prove that they're not going to use the things I write as an excuse to act like youtube "body language experts" dissecting a tiktok.

[lordkevington-deactivated-deact]

A trend I've been noticing on tumblr lately is the assumption that basically "if it's problematic, it's because it's propaganda," which I just think is fundamentally untrue.

Like, there are things that are problematic, and we should definitely unpack and analyze them, but more often than not they're because of ignorance, or misinformation, or a billion other reasons, (usually able to be reduced to a problem with patriarchy or capitalism,) but labeling EVERYTHING bad as propaganda SUPER muddies the waters for people who need to analyze and point out ACTUAL propaganda happening.

[ms-disinformation]

Genuinely asking, despite how ridiculous I find this psyop conspiracy, do you have a post debunking all of the "do not endorse" posts you're reblogging as evidence? I haven't seen anything with sources contradicting them, only more sources corroborating them.

The “do not endorse” posts I recently reblogged aren’t necessarily untrue, they are posts that were reblogged by one person over a short-ish period of time that I collected to be able to reference in the future because I (understandably) tend to get blocked by the blogs that I explore.

See my response to the tumblr staff post for links debunking the milwaukee sex trafficking ring post and the bait bricks; the other ten or so posts are to prove a pattern because this is the pattern a lot of these blogs work from: share 10 true posts, reblog one piece of incorrect information, decontextualized information, or dangerous information.

However I’m curious - krxs100 is unusual in that they’ve posted a VERY bullshit post *recently* and they don’t fit the timeline of the other blogs I’m observing.

The other blogs I’m observing are a cluster of 12 blogs that are very popular, were created within the same one-month span (7 of which were created in the same week). I’ve proved that two of those blogs are posting from the same computer/cellphone/shared drive and I’ve done comprehensive debunkings of many of their posts (many of which had been debunked before.)

I’m curious as to why people don’t believe there are troll/psyop/misinformation blogs on tumblr when there were KNOWN misinformation accounts in 2016 that you can ask around and find people who interacted with them and who thought they were suspicious even before they got taken down - there’s evidence of this. They tried to sell contact lists.

If it happened in 2014-2016 and there’s proof that it happened and people remember it happening why do you think it couldn’t be happening now?

Or to flip it another way: There is a tremendous amount of testimony about the Internet Research Agency interacting with all kinds of users. Several different online platforms identified different accounts that they were able to hone in on because of financial transactions or backend data, some of which was observable to users across platforms.

Why do you think that all of these people, down to the users, would lie about it?

There’s a data dump of the information from the facebook ads. You can scroll down my blog and find it - it’s got something like 23 notes. You can go examine the data on github for yourself.

Why would someone fabricate that? To that granular level? 

To discredit American leftists in 2020? To silence 84 bloggers on tumblr who were too close to the truth?

Why does it seem more plausible that an american leftist who has been blogging since 2013 (at least) would reblog the exact same misinformation post 18 times in 24 hours but would never share Riot Medicine?

Why does it seem reasonable that a blogger who is supposedly part of an activist community shares videos of police violence against black people dozens of times but never shares mutual aid posts?

Why does it make sense that American leftists would repeatedly, over and over and over and over share incorrect information about sex trafficking in the form of “watch out for zip ties on your car windows or signs advertising jobs or kids asking for help” but never talk about labor trafficking?

Part of the reason I let this blog fall by the wayside is because I’m genuinely frustrated with centrists and liberals calling everyone left of dick fucking cheney a goddamned psyop.

This blog is supposed to be a critique of these things *from the left* because between Daily Kos and a general, understandable antipathy toward the mainstream news there’s not a hell of a lot of media literacy or critical thinking about information sources going on on the left.

So let’s say that, for instance, Krxs100 is NOT any variety of troll or fake or bot or whatever but is genuinely “a Latina doing her due diligence” - why has the misinformation in her post about milwaukee not been corrected? The post has been up for two weeks, there’s a gofund me for Jaleesa Hall, who lost her home during the incident that krxs100 gleefully reblogged 18 times two weeks ago - why hasn’t the fundraiser been shared to make up for the damage done by the false reporting on sex trafficking?

Why haven’t there been any follow-ups or additional information? That post has nearly 50k notes, but in the two weeks since then there’s been no discussion of protests or news or updates on the “pedophile ring” or the police response - just memes. 

I dunno. It’s easy for me to believe that’s a troll because the blog sure isn’t acting like any leftists I know.

[ms-disinformation]

^48hr period

^ 24hr period

^ 48hr period

If you click on those you should be able to see them a little better, but I cannot overstate how much these blogs do not follow a standard reblogging pattern. They *constantly* reblog their same posts and this isn’t like a discourse blog where someone is reblogging the same post because they’re having an argument, these reblogs have things like “what the fuck” and emojis and “I can’t believe this is happening” as the only additional commentary.

It is VERY STRANGE to reblog your own post nineteen times in 24 hours without adding more information or having a discussion, but simply reblogging it so that it ends up on as many dashboards as possible.

Here’s one that didn’t pick up any traction:

8 reblogs in 24 hours. There’s actually NO commentary added to this one, just relentlessly reblogging hoping to get an audience.

Here’s one that DID pick up traction:

18 reblogs in 24 hours. There’s no additional commentary on ANY of those post. At one point they reblogged it five times in a row without adding anything more to the post.

This was the behavior that made me leery of lagonegirl back in 2016 - they’d followed me and I followed back and I lasted about two days before the constant reblogs of long chains of tweets got too irritating. Then they showed up as one of the IRA blogs. Then I started looking for post-IRA blogs with the same behavior.

So yeah, here’s another thing: if OP has made a post that’s a series of twitter screenshots and you’re suspicious of it go to their archive and look at how many times they reblogged that post the week that they made it. 

If their archive looks like this ^^^ maybe don’t reblog the post.

[ms-demeanor]

there are a lot of people who worry that they might come off like one of these blogs because they don’t interact with people much and I really want you all to see this to understand exactly how weird these blogs act.

[ms-disinformation]

Just for comparison’s sake:

I have a somewhat similar posting rate to these blogs, usually under 15 posts a day, sometimes skipping the website for days at a time. From August 8th to August 11th I’ve got four posts that I’m OP on that I’ve reblogged multiple times: one about catgrass, one about muffins, one about pie plates, and this post. Each reblog has additional content - the muffin post included recipes, the pie plates included photos of pie plates, the grass had a progression of images of grass growing, this post is obviously something I keep adding to.

Reblogging your own post 18 times in 24 hours at random intervals is *not* a typical blogging behavior.

Like, OK, here’s a reveal:

This is a (largely unreadable) screenshot of a comparison I did of 3 blogs that people had repeatedly asked me to check out because they thought they were spam/bots.

I went through and I did a comparison of each blog’s most recent 100 posts and, as you can see, the behavior was very different.

The first one is @mysharona1987 and I get asked about them a lot and I’m not going to lie, I don’t exactly know what the fuck is up with that blog, it’s weird as hell when you look at it for a second. The multicolored bars are posts they reblogged in that 100 posts, so all the teal ones are the same post, or all the red ones are the same post. The column with the yellow bars shows the source of the posts - all the yellow bars are posts that are NOT from mysharona1987. That is a blog that posts twitter screencaps and reblogs itself at a very unusual rate.

On the other hand, several of those reblogged posts were personal textposts and there were quite a few answered asks when I looked. As a result I categorized them as “weird but not a troll” - also, notably, most of their screenshots weren’t of *news* they were of *quotes* - what they reblog doesn’t appear to claim to be informative, it is largely persuasive instead of informational. Quiteliterallyhotsauce, blackqueerblog, krxs100, etc - these blogs post “news” scraped from twitter (for the most part - sometimes it’s quotes from a politician but it’s usually “why isn’t anybody talking about this” kinds of “news” posts)

The second blog was @feministism, which (at least at the time, I haven’t looked at any of these blogs since october 2019) was ALSO kind of weird.

Almost *all* of feministism’s content was screencaps they had made of memes or tweets or even other tumblr posts and had posted to their page. The column with that one little lonely bar? The white spaces are the ones where feministism is OP (of the screencapped stuff other people made) and the one little yellow bar was an answered ask.

I baaaaasically consider feministism a content mill. They tend to get a lot of reblogs and likes but almost never make original content and share a lot of inspirational stuff. ALSO most of their posts were single-image posts.

So, really weird, not super helpful, I don’t understand why it exists, but not even close to pretending to be a normal blog. This blog doesn’t reblog *any* aesthetic stuff or shitposts unrelated to feminism or anything like that. It’s a heavily curated content mill to appeal to generic feminist tumblrites.

It doesn’t fit with my standard definition of misinformation because, again, it’s not posting news it’s posting Brie Larson tweets and memes about equality and nothing was reblogged multiple times.

Third and last: @reverseracism who I know is an actual human person but who gets accused of being a psyop a lot.

Reverseracism didn’t reblog anything multiple times, most of the posts they reblogged came from a wide variety of people they follow (as opposed to the first two blogs where the blogs being examined were OP on most posts) though their yellow bars are for answered asks.

The purple bars in their reblogs are posts they had reblogged where the blogs I was tracking were OP, but nothing about their blogging patterns suggest that they’re any sort of troll, they just have specific interests that they focus on. (I have blurred out the names of the blogs that I’ve been tracking but have not yet named because I am still kind of lazily and half-assedly tracking them)

But that post WAAAAAAAY up at the top with the pink dots? Those are within krxs100′s most recent 100 posts and if you compare that to mysharona1987, a blog that reblogs itself to kind of a weird extent, even mysharona1987 didn’t have ANY posts that they reblogged 18 times in 24 hours. (all of mysharona’s posts were over the course of about 24 hours, they’re very prolific. feministism is a much more sedate blogger, their 100 posts spanned from August to october. ReverseRacism was somewhere in the middle, taking 11 days to make 100 posts).

Anyway it’s late and I’m tired but I’d just like to make the point that even the blog that reblogs itself so much that I had ten people message me asking if it was a bot didn’t reblog the same post with no additional commentary or information 17 times in 24 hours.

Also the misinformation blogs that I’m discussing specifically target marginalized groups and activist communities with misinformation and often focus hardest on attracting black readers by winnowing in on black issues. Instead of following krxs100 with their “outside agitators” and bullshit about burned houses check out @afro-elf​, @odinsblog​, and @reverseracism​ because they’re bloggers who (aside from being cool people with cool interests) make informative posts about police brutality, antiblack racism, black history, and the oft-ignored work of black creators and statesmen.

[ms-disinformation]

My apologies, this is a total mess. So, to recap:

Lefthand bar with multiple colors - Mysharona1987, reblogs themself a lot, makes a lot of posts that are twitter screencaps, fair number of personal posts. My take: they’ve got a way of running their blog that doesn’t make sense to me but they’re just a blogger. (I only checked them out because I had several people independently ask me to look at them) The colored bars are posts they reblogged multiple times - all the purple bars are the same post, all the teal bars are the same post. These were all posts made in about 24 hours. They interact with other bloggers, reblog posts with commentary, and sometimes add info in tags. Someone’s main.

Center left bar with the one red stripe - feministism, almost all original posts, all the “original” posts are screengrabbed content from twitter. Feminist-positive content mill, clearly a sideblog, NOT someone’s main. (Again, checked it out because a bunch of people asked me to). No reblogs of their own content, no reblogs of other people’s content, they post things once then leave it be. Posts were made over about 3 months. No interaction with other blogs, no reblogs, no tag commentary outside of factual identification.

Center right bar with purple stripes - Reverseracism. Purple stripes are reblogs of blogs I’m tracking here but none of their posts/reblogs are duplicated. Yellow bars on the side are answered asks. Checked out the blog because a bunch of people mentioned it to me; seems very clearly to be someone’s main where they interact with mutuals via reblogs and write additions to posts and comment in tags. This is just a dude. Just a guy with a popular blog.

Righthand bar - krxs100′s most recent 100 posts.

If you look to the far right you’ll see a gray and yellow stripe - that’s to break up dates to help illustrate my point. The date range of the posts is from July 16th to August 12th; the yellow bar, the time in which the milwaukee post was reblogged 17 times, is from July 23rd to July 24th, which is a posting rate FAR outside of their norm.

They reblogged both from themself and from other bloggers so this wasn’t a tumblr glitch causing multiple postings at random times, they reblogged with and without commentary. I’ve documented the entire commentary that was reblogged so that you can see it:

Riveting stuff. Totally worthwhile additions.

Anyway, pink bars show where they reblogged from themselves OR from a blog that they claim they got locked out of in 2016 but

the blog that they “got locked out of” shared the same set of twitter screencaps on two different posts 20 and 25 times respectively from June 15th and June 19th (which is reflected in the initial post I made about this; the teal dots are one of these posts). So they don’t exactly seem locked out.

Anyway. I dug through that blog’s history and there were some major changes in the way that posting was handled from its inception in 2010 to when selfies started getting posted in 2013 to when the screencap blogging started in 2014.

Also there’s this:

Which. Uh. Yeah that’s not a great look for someone who says “follow for more news.”

Oh, and hey, bonus: you know those posts about how the mall of america is shut down as a protest against police brutality and store employees came out in solidarity with the protestors?

yeah that’s actually from a post that krxs10 made in 2014 being used for misinformation now. Here’s that same post being shared in July 2020.

(as a side note: one of the things that you can do to help avoid misinformation like this from spreading is including a date in your time-sensitive posts and making sure to screencap dates if you’re taking screenshots.)

Anyway, I’m not sure exactly what the fuck is up with krxs100; it’s not one of the blogs that I was initially tracking and one of the defining features of the blogs that I was initially tracking was that they were all created within the same month-long period of time (which is still true of the other blogs I’m looking at). krxs100 predates that by a significant amount, krxs10 predates that by A LOT.

But I can tell you that for the last few months at least the krxs100 account has a posting profile that is extremely similar to the other blogs I’ve been tracking and that is out of step with most of the blogging behavior that I’ve observed in either politically involved casual posters, activist blogs, or political news blogs.

[ms-disinformation]

Did you reactivate this blog because the evil mean leftists said they weren't gonna vote for a cop?

I reactivated the blog because Tumblr staff made a post that makes it clear they believe misdirection about voting and shitpost character blogs are the problem with misinformaton on the platform instead of, you know, popular blogs with a massive following telling their followers that it was a totally good and right thing for a mob to burn down a house because the neighbors saw goody proctor in the woods with the devil.

I reactivated this blog SPECIFICALLY because tumblr’s interpretation of “misinformation” was limited to electoralist bullshit when the actual threat is blogs spreading posts about plywood shields, rebranding quanon conspiracies as leftism, and cheering on the burning of a family home.

One of the main blogs that I track here made posts claiming the Hong Kong protests were funded by US intelligence agencies, the blog that I posted about yesterday has posts claiming that violence at protests is a result of outside agitators.

PLEASE ASK YOURSELF WHY YOU THINK “CHECK SOURCES” IS ANTI-LEFTIST.

[ms-disinformation]

^48hr period

^ 24hr period

^ 48hr period

If you click on those you should be able to see them a little better, but I cannot overstate how much these blogs do not follow a standard reblogging pattern. They *constantly* reblog their same posts and this isn’t like a discourse blog where someone is reblogging the same post because they’re having an argument, these reblogs have things like “what the fuck” and emojis and “I can’t believe this is happening” as the only additional commentary.

It is VERY STRANGE to reblog your own post nineteen times in 24 hours without adding more information or having a discussion, but simply reblogging it so that it ends up on as many dashboards as possible.

Here’s one that didn’t pick up any traction:

8 reblogs in 24 hours. There’s actually NO commentary added to this one, just relentlessly reblogging hoping to get an audience.

Here’s one that DID pick up traction:

18 reblogs in 24 hours. There’s no additional commentary on ANY of those post. At one point they reblogged it five times in a row without adding anything more to the post.

This was the behavior that made me leery of lagonegirl back in 2016 - they’d followed me and I followed back and I lasted about two days before the constant reblogs of long chains of tweets got too irritating. Then they showed up as one of the IRA blogs. Then I started looking for post-IRA blogs with the same behavior.

So yeah, here’s another thing: if OP has made a post that’s a series of twitter screenshots and you’re suspicious of it go to their archive and look at how many times they reblogged that post the week that they made it. 

If their archive looks like this ^^^ maybe don’t reblog the post.

[ms-demeanor]

there are a lot of people who worry that they might come off like one of these blogs because they don’t interact with people much and I really want you all to see this to understand exactly how weird these blogs act.

[ms-disinformation]

Just for comparison’s sake:

I have a somewhat similar posting rate to these blogs, usually under 15 posts a day, sometimes skipping the website for days at a time. From August 8th to August 11th I’ve got four posts that I’m OP on that I’ve reblogged multiple times: one about catgrass, one about muffins, one about pie plates, and this post. Each reblog has additional content - the muffin post included recipes, the pie plates included photos of pie plates, the grass had a progression of images of grass growing, this post is obviously something I keep adding to.

Reblogging your own post 18 times in 24 hours at random intervals is *not* a typical blogging behavior.

Like, OK, here’s a reveal:

This is a (largely unreadable) screenshot of a comparison I did of 3 blogs that people had repeatedly asked me to check out because they thought they were spam/bots.

I went through and I did a comparison of each blog’s most recent 100 posts and, as you can see, the behavior was very different.

The first one is @mysharona1987 and I get asked about them a lot and I’m not going to lie, I don’t exactly know what the fuck is up with that blog, it’s weird as hell when you look at it for a second. The multicolored bars are posts they reblogged in that 100 posts, so all the teal ones are the same post, or all the red ones are the same post. The column with the yellow bars shows the source of the posts - all the yellow bars are posts that are NOT from mysharona1987. That is a blog that posts twitter screencaps and reblogs itself at a very unusual rate.

On the other hand, several of those reblogged posts were personal textposts and there were quite a few answered asks when I looked. As a result I categorized them as “weird but not a troll” - also, notably, most of their screenshots weren’t of *news* they were of *quotes* - what they reblog doesn’t appear to claim to be informative, it is largely persuasive instead of informational. Quiteliterallyhotsauce, blackqueerblog, krxs100, etc - these blogs post “news” scraped from twitter (for the most part - sometimes it’s quotes from a politician but it’s usually “why isn’t anybody talking about this” kinds of “news” posts)

The second blog was @feministism, which (at least at the time, I haven’t looked at any of these blogs since october 2019) was ALSO kind of weird.

Almost *all* of feministism’s content was screencaps they had made of memes or tweets or even other tumblr posts and had posted to their page. The column with that one little lonely bar? The white spaces are the ones where feministism is OP (of the screencapped stuff other people made) and the one little yellow bar was an answered ask.

I baaaaasically consider feministism a content mill. They tend to get a lot of reblogs and likes but almost never make original content and share a lot of inspirational stuff. ALSO most of their posts were single-image posts.

So, really weird, not super helpful, I don’t understand why it exists, but not even close to pretending to be a normal blog. This blog doesn’t reblog *any* aesthetic stuff or shitposts unrelated to feminism or anything like that. It’s a heavily curated content mill to appeal to generic feminist tumblrites.

It doesn’t fit with my standard definition of misinformation because, again, it’s not posting news it’s posting Brie Larson tweets and memes about equality and nothing was reblogged multiple times.

Third and last: @reverseracism who I know is an actual human person but who gets accused of being a psyop a lot.

Reverseracism didn’t reblog anything multiple times, most of the posts they reblogged came from a wide variety of people they follow (as opposed to the first two blogs where the blogs being examined were OP on most posts) though their yellow bars are for answered asks.

The purple bars in their reblogs are posts they had reblogged where the blogs I was tracking were OP, but nothing about their blogging patterns suggest that they’re any sort of troll, they just have specific interests that they focus on. (I have blurred out the names of the blogs that I’ve been tracking but have not yet named because I am still kind of lazily and half-assedly tracking them)

But that post WAAAAAAAY up at the top with the pink dots? Those are within krxs100′s most recent 100 posts and if you compare that to mysharona1987, a blog that reblogs itself to kind of a weird extent, even mysharona1987 didn’t have ANY posts that they reblogged 18 times in 24 hours. (all of mysharona’s posts were over the course of about 24 hours, they’re very prolific. feministism is a much more sedate blogger, their 100 posts spanned from August to october. ReverseRacism was somewhere in the middle, taking 11 days to make 100 posts).

Anyway it’s late and I’m tired but I’d just like to make the point that even the blog that reblogs itself so much that I had ten people message me asking if it was a bot didn’t reblog the same post with no additional commentary or information 17 times in 24 hours.

Also the misinformation blogs that I’m discussing specifically target marginalized groups and activist communities with misinformation and often focus hardest on attracting black readers by winnowing in on black issues. Instead of following krxs100 with their “outside agitators” and bullshit about burned houses check out @afro-elf​, @odinsblog​, and @reverseracism​ because they’re bloggers who (aside from being cool people with cool interests) make informative posts about police brutality, antiblack racism, black history, and the oft-ignored work of black creators and statesmen.

[ms-demeanor]

I know people have been shitty about it before, but I do want to thank you for the work you do trying to talk openly about misinformation. It's honestly can be frustrating trying to talk to someone about how something they reblogged is a distorted version of the truth, especially when its around something like police brutality/incompetence, but its really helpful to see other people doing it too

Absolutely one of the most useful posts on this issue is when @leupagus went through that post full of photos of activists at protests and identified one as a still from a movie.

https://psyops-redux.tumblr.com/post/623000507745697793/dont-trust-tumblr-please

Almost all of the post that they broke down is true. Almost all of it is real activists - but one photo is fake.

That’s a near-perfect illustration of how these misinfo blogs work. krxs100 posted a dozen tweetstorms about police brutality that are true and that deserve to be noticed and protested. And then they posted one collection of screenshotted tweets that was full of a social media firestorm that led to burning down an actual house with no evidence.

[ms-disinformation]

Updated link to that Leupagus post.

[ms-disinformation]

^48hr period

^ 24hr period

^ 48hr period

If you click on those you should be able to see them a little better, but I cannot overstate how much these blogs do not follow a standard reblogging pattern. They *constantly* reblog their same posts and this isn’t like a discourse blog where someone is reblogging the same post because they’re having an argument, these reblogs have things like “what the fuck” and emojis and “I can’t believe this is happening” as the only additional commentary.

It is VERY STRANGE to reblog your own post nineteen times in 24 hours without adding more information or having a discussion, but simply reblogging it so that it ends up on as many dashboards as possible.

Here’s one that didn’t pick up any traction:

8 reblogs in 24 hours. There’s actually NO commentary added to this one, just relentlessly reblogging hoping to get an audience.

Here’s one that DID pick up traction:

18 reblogs in 24 hours. There’s no additional commentary on ANY of those post. At one point they reblogged it five times in a row without adding anything more to the post.

This was the behavior that made me leery of lagonegirl back in 2016 - they’d followed me and I followed back and I lasted about two days before the constant reblogs of long chains of tweets got too irritating. Then they showed up as one of the IRA blogs. Then I started looking for post-IRA blogs with the same behavior.

So yeah, here’s another thing: if OP has made a post that’s a series of twitter screenshots and you’re suspicious of it go to their archive and look at how many times they reblogged that post the week that they made it. 

If their archive looks like this ^^^ maybe don’t reblog the post.

[staff]

Hey Tumblr,

With the 2020 United States Presidential Election on our horizon, we wanted to proactively beef up our Community Guidelines to stymie any political interference. 

There’s precedent—not paranoia—backing this decision. In 2016, the Internet Research Agency or IRA (a group with close ties to Russian intelligence)  was found to have created hundreds of fake accounts across most social media platforms, including Tumblr. Their sole objective was—is!—to sow dangerous seeds of misinformation. The declassified DNI report refers to the IRA as “professional trolls.”

These “professional trolls” are not welcome on Tumblr, and we wanted our Community Guidelines to reflect that. We clarified our “Confusion or Impersonation” section by renaming it “Impersonation and Non-Genuine Behavior,” specifying that impersonating a public official is not allowed. Parody? Totally fine. Pretending to be Bill de Blasio to spread false info about NYC? Absolutely not fine. Also, it doesn’t even sound fun.

We also added a whole new section on integrity:

“Election Integrity. You may not use Tumblr to defraud nor impede the integrity of the United States Census or local, regional, or national public office elections. Bottom line: do not create or promote content designed to suppress, intimidate, or confuse voters or U.S. census participants. This includes spreading false information about how to vote, when to vote, or where to vote.” 

The last addition we made to our Community Guidelines reads as follows: “Repeat violations of our Community Guidelines may result in permanent blog or account suspension.” This is not a new policy—it’s just reworded to make our stance as clear-cut as possible: We do not tolerate repeat violators of our Community Guidelines.

Democracy requires transparency and honesty. If we are made aware of any targeted disinformation campaigns on Tumblr from the IRA or groups like them, we will swiftly take action. We have a moral obligation to you, ourselves, and the future of democracy to do whatever is within our power.

If you want to help combat misinformation, check out this video on @world-wide-what for some helpful tips, share this infographic by Tumblr Creatr Ellis van der Does (@ellisvanderdoes) for the National Association for Media Literacy Education (@medialiteracyed), and please (please!) make sure you are registered to vote. 

Stay safe, Tumblr.

[ms-disinformation]

I cannot explain enough how the IRA blogs on tumblr and the current misinfo blogs on tumblr are NOT doing things like misleading people about election day or pretending to be bill de blasio as a shitpost blog.

(though back in January quiteliterallyhotsauce did get somewhere between 40-100k notes by trying to insist that impeaching trump meant impeaching Pence and also the entire cabinet)

There is very little that I could do to report any of the blogs posting misinformation on tumblr because most of the misinformation they are posting is screenshots of people being sincere but incorrect from Twitter or things that are theoretically correct but missing a significant amount of nuance and context.

The misinformation campaigns we’re seeing are things like this recent post from @krxs100​ in which they claim that a local crowd took down a pedophile trafficking ring that was being protected by the police, who refused to go into the home to look for two missing girls.

What actually happened was that a mob of people burned down a house that someone *claimed* was associated with pedophiles because it had been visited multiple times by the police. A tenant of the house watched her home burn down while she was giving birth and said that she had lived there for a year with her two year old child and never seen any evidence of human trafficking. The missing girls were found three miles away and claimed to have never been in the burned house.

(note: I do not need to rely on what the police say to see that burning this home made no sense and helped no one. BTW you can donate to Jaleesa Hall’s GofundMe by clicking this sentence)

While we’re at it we can look at krxs100′s top ten posts of 2020:

https://krxs100.tumblr.com/post/621504875016208384/andrew-heney-owner-of-the-freeway-autoshop-told

https://krxs100.tumblr.com/post/621676983838015489/elijah-mcclain-was-a-kind-and-gentle-23-year-old

https://krxs100.tumblr.com/post/621226201014484992/atlanta-police-walkout-in-protest-following-murder

https://krxs100.tumblr.com/post/620964359228850176/newly-released-police-body-cam-footage-shows

https://krxs100.tumblr.com/post/619780537022808064/undercover-cops-are-being-caught-planting

https://krxs100.tumblr.com/post/619764526505754624/young-black-boy-killed-during-protests-by-white

https://krxs100.tumblr.com/post/624454522059767808/heres-what-you-need-to-know-originally-2-girls

https://krxs100.tumblr.com/post/619972927726714881/attention-video

https://krxs100.tumblr.com/post/623179146645946368/he-was-my-everything-boy-who-drowned-in

https://krxs100.tumblr.com/post/620023352191516672/for-those-of-you-protesting

Every single one of those is a series of screenshots of tweets, most of them are about the victims of police brutality but one is the misinformation about the house burned down in milwaukee, and one is spreading the bait bricks conspiracy that started at the beginning of the 2020BLM protests.

Each of those posts ends with #wake up and/or #stay woke alongside an exhortation to follow the blog for more news about BLM, police brutality, and people of color.

Interestingly one of their most popular posts from 2019 is a similar series of screencaps about the DNC leaks where all of the tweets happen to be made by people like Matt Forney or folks with “deplorable” in their name and a MAGA hat in their user pic.

So. As someone who has been looking into this for a while and had to take a break because of exactly how much people were willing to ignore what I was saying:

HERE’S HOW TO SPOT A PROFESSIONAL TUMBLR TROLL [Edited 1/19/2023] SOCKPUPPET

Minimal interaction with mutuals or followers. These blogs will reblog funny memes and aesthetic photos and shitposts but they almost never communicate with other people or write commentary on someone else’s post. The most they write tends to be on posts they’ve made and that tends to be bullet points or short paragraphs underneath long collections of screencaps. They reblog their own popular posts a lot with commentary from other people, but almost never answer questions or add on to that commentary beyond a couple of words.

Most of their original posts are series of screencaps. They rarely answer asks, make text posts, or post photos they’ve taken. They will reblog a lot of those things but most of their posts on which they are OP are sceencaps.

They provide minimal sources or the sources are misleading OR the sources are just links back to the twitter accounts they screencapped.

They reblog their own shit constantly. Seriously, if you go scroll krsx100′s blog from today until July 20th you’ll find about 10 reblogs of the milwaukee post with no updates or corrections, only appending on one or two lines from other outraged bloggers - that blog posts an average of three times a day, that one (very long) post is about a quarter of the posts it has made in the last month.

They don’t care if they’re contradicting themselves. One day they’ll blog “fuck the police” and the next they’ll claim the hong kong protests are a false flag. In 2019 they’ll reblog a bunch of alt right tweets about the DNC leaks, in 2020 every post ends with Stay Woke.

And if you go back and look at what lagonegirl and BellyGanstaBoo were posting it’s the same thing just four years later. A blog that is full of what you’d expect from a bog-standard tumblr blog (reblogs of shitposts, the meme of the week, aesthetic soft pink photos and humans are awesome video compilations) interrupted by constant reblogs of screenshots of twitter.

Anyway, there is an excellent 2019 report put out by Data & Society on how to identify online misinformation and I highly recommend reading it.

If you don’t feel up to that I have bullet-pointed that report here.

[leupagus]

Don’t Trust Tumblr, Please

So I’ve seen this post floating around a lot, and the pictures in it are immensely powerful. And almost all of them are real. 

Almost.

One picture, though, bothered me—not because it looked fake, but because it looked like the moment before a truly horrific tragedy, and I was troubled by the idea that I was looking at something that perhaps only moments later resulted in death. It was this picture: 

So I did a quick image search

and found that it was all over pinterest and twitter and such, which are… unhelpful sources at the best of times. But I did see the picture posted on Reddit, which is a cesspool but usually is pretty good about sourcing its shit. And: 

Sure enough, when I looked up the trailer, here was that exact moment:

Welp.

But why does this matter? In the dozen or so pictures of that really great post, one of them wasn’t a genuine moment of protest against or confrontation with an oppressive, bigoted authority. That’s not a big deal, right?

Maybe not. But it shows how easy it is to sneak in fake information, misleading information, or just wrong information into posts that are largely accurate. And if you’re scrolling through and think “90% of this is stuff I agree with, the other 10% is probably fine too,” you’re more apt to digest the fake stuff along with the real stuff. 

This is particularly important right now, when we’re on the eve of US elections that will quite literally decide our country’s fate for the next fifty years; we cannot, CANNOT trust the things that are reblogged onto our dashboard, even by our good friends (the person who reblogged this onto my timeline is a friend who is imminently trustworthy, for example). We have to be mindful, we have to check sources, we have to consider what we’re looking at.

And that’s not fun! That’s not what tumblr is here for, for most of us; God knows I’d much rather reblog the 1000th gifset of Schitt’s Creek or some shit. But unfortunately, social media isn’t just a place to have fun anymore; it’s been weaponized, quite literally, by people who want us to believe shitty things and are very, very good at sneaking those shitty beliefs into places where we won’t notice them until they’re part of our own ideology.

This isn’t a command that you have to source every single picture or bit of information you reblog; but it is a request that you stop to think. Humans tend to chase the feeling of validation and confirming their own beliefs, and that’s totally understandable. But don’t mistake validation for the truth.

[feminismandmedia]

On this note, please make sure you actually read the sources listed & not just notice that they linked something. At the very least open it.

I’ve seen people say stuff that is blatantly false & link a random article and it’s taken as fact.

Literally I could post “this dog shaved off its own hair” and link to a Rick Roll.. and people would never bother to open it & would continue believing that the dog shaved its own hair off.

Obviously my thing is kinda ridiculous, but I’ve seen this happen with so many real issues. People blatantly lie about what’s in their source. I’ve seen people do this in callouts for users too. Be sure to read & investigate yourself. People spreading false information & propaganda want you to react, not research.

[la-laborista-republiko]

There's a whole lot going on here, but I'd like to draw special attention to the fact that they think "K-Pop" is the name of a band

[rachelbethhines]

That's not a real human being. That's a russian troll. You can tell from the image. They stole that poor girl's photo and photoshopped a MAGA cap on it to.

[violetbeam]

she literally has a youtube channel on which she gushes about trump in every video. wtf are you talking about?

[ms-disinformation]

Y’all, shit is too weird now to parse what the actual fuck is going on with psyops blogs but, again, one of the basics of what I look at is whether or not the blogs I’m exploring act like actual, real human beings.

If a blog is full of answered asks and selfies and exchanges with mutuals or if it links to an active twitter or youtube or general human online personality then it’s pretty safe to say it’s a true believer, not a psyop.

Real tankies exist. Real racial separatists exist. RADFEMS, fuck, radfems exist.

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

russian-ad-explorer/russian-ad-datasets

Datasets derived from the 2018 IRA ad release. Contribute to russian-ad-explorer/russian-ad-datasets development by creating an account on G

[ms-demeanor]

You reblogged a post on your political sideblog pointing out how liberals attribute various problems (the rise of the alt reich, disagreement among the left, etc.) to Russian trolls. I agree that those people are too quick to blame all problems on Russia. But I've seen some of the "anti-anti-Trump left" (thanks marcusseldon) go too far the opposite way and DOWNPLAY Russian troublemaking. I'm pretty sure Russian trolls and hackers HAVE been up to no good, even if people exaggerate their influence

I dunno, friend. I kind of had to stop using Psyops-redux a little bit because people were WAY too willing to see conspiracy theories and russians behind stuff that’s easily explained by everyday politics. (Best example: someone claimed that a hashtag criticizing Bloomberg’s economic policy started during peak Russian hours and therefore must have been motivated by foreign sockpuppets instead of a real-time debate audience responding to his performance in a debate)

It’s important to me that people recognize that the IRA is a thing and that there are active misinformation groups/blogs/whatever out there but the focus on it being RUSSIA and only RUSSIA doing this is counterproductive for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it leads to you being dismissed by the mainstream as a paranoid conspiracy theorist and it gets you dismissed by the left as trying to drum up a second red scare.

Personally I don’t know how much it matters that it’s any country or group in particular spreading misinformation because I think we should all be practicing good data hygiene and checking the sources of the information we share and trying to understand issues before we speak in depth about them or form unshakeable opinions about them and I think we should do that whether that info is being shared by our supposed allies as well as our ideological opposites.

[ms-disinformation]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

In the context of online misinformation/russian Psyops the Internet Research Agency is going to be a lot more likely to pop up than the Irish Republican Army and the chances of me discussing financial/investment plans is pretty much zero.

[black-morticia]

Conservatives dismissing any criticism of Republican politicians as "Fake News" and Liberals dismissing any criticism Democratic politicians as "Russian Bots/Trolls" has the same rancid energy.

[ms-disinformation]

Please remember that the blogs that this blog has been tracking have a few notable hallmarks:

Minimal interaction with followers

Political posts on which the blogger is the OP that are screenshots of other web platforms with no links to sources and minimal commentary from the blogger.

No personal posts

If someone is taking the time to meaningfully argue with you, if someone’s blog is full of personal posts, if a blog has robust interactions with mutuals, or if a blog is text-heavy with writing from OP it is not the kind of blog I’m looking at.

[collapsedsquid]

A new book on cognitive psychology explains that people aren’t nearly as gullible or easily swayed as the media would have you think.

To believe in something can mean two things. I believe there’s a computer in front of me. This is an intuitive belief, which guides my behavior. I believe that I’m revolving at a fantastic speed around the center of the earth. This is a reflective belief, which has no impact on my behavior. Many unfounded beliefs are reflective. Take Pizzagate, the debunked conspiracy theory claiming that high-level Democrats were abusing children in the basement of a D.C. pizzeria. According to polls, millions of Americans were supposed to believe it. Yet only one — Edgar Maddison Welch — behaved as if he intuitively believed children were being abused, storming the pizzeria with a big gun and demanding that the children be freed. Others did nothing or, at worst, left one-star reviews with a bizarre mix of straightforward accusations (the staff kept eyeing my kids) and mundane complaints (not only are they pedophiles, but the pizza was cold). Such behavior can only be explained if the belief in Pizzagate is held reflectively.

In many ways, people holding unfounded reflective beliefs is less of a problem than if they held such beliefs intuitively: witness the difference between leaving a stupid review online and spending a few years in jail (Welch’s current fate). Still, why profess to such apparently stupid ideas as Pizzagate, flat earth or countless other conspiracy theories? Counterintuitively, holding such beliefs might be a way for people of showing (some) others that they can be relied on. When making statements that many find inane and offensive, we burn our bridges, making it difficult to cooperate — work with, be friends with — the people we’ve offended: Most Democrats, I imagine, wouldn’t want to work with a believer in Pizzagate. By sending a strong signal that we can’t cooperate with much of the population, we also send a signal to the rest that we can be relied on, since we don’t have any other choice but to cooperate with them. Burning bridges is one of the reasons I explore in the book for why people profess crazy beliefs.

Given one of the activities supposedly being affected is “voting“ is saying “they don’t really believe it, they may just leave one-star reviews“ different from “they don’t really believe it, they just vote it“

[ms-demeanor]

Improvements in technology, from the first clumsy propaganda attempts to modern, analytics-fueled political campaigns, have done nothing to alter this conclusion. Yet at every stage, new technologies have been decried as terrifying tools of mind control. These trends will continue: new technologies will arise (targeted advertising, deepfakes, etc.), there will be a hue and cry, yet getting people to accept uncongenial views, or to engage in costly behaviors, will remain tremendously difficult.

I’m probably not going to buy and read the book because I’ve got other shit going on but, like.

I would very much like to know how this attitude that “getting people to accept uncongenial views or to engage in costly behaviors will remain tremendously difficult” pairs up with antivaxxers as a social media movement.