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.