Influence Operations on Gab, Part One

or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Enjoy Engaging in Psywar

In mid-2016 I saw rumblings on various forums and blogs about Gab, a then-new social media startup committed to free speech per the laws of the United States. The owner, Andrew Torba, a young veteran of Silicon Valley startup lab Y Combinator, was clearly committed to providing a place for conservatives and Donald Trump voters, and it was widely implied that he had substantial financial backing from the then-small SV faction backing a Trump election coalition. I applied for a second round beta account and got access November 1, 2016, a week before election day. I'll spare any further speculation or observations about Gab itself, Andrew Torba, and the various drama and stick purely to my observations on the most interesting phenomena in that hothouse - the utterly transparent psychological operations carried out by governments and NGOs against what became known among the libtards as the most "extreme" semi-mainstream right site on the intertubez.

First, my Internet Mans background - I was heavily involved in the pre-internet BBS world in the early to mid 90s, and first had internet access in 1992, wherein all tools were accessed via a Unix platform. I was instantly addicted to Usenet, and Web 1.0 around 1994 when Lynx became a thing, and by 1997 was a heavy forum user. For a time I considered "libertarianism" (ew) closest to my own political and philosophical beliefs, although this was broken by Hans Herman Hoppe. Thanks, Hans! Because of life, career and family, in the mid-00s through the mid-teens I poasted less, lurked more, and had become fairly blackpilled about our political future in America, assuming that a "c-c-collapse" was imminent, as was the style at the time. Instead, I focused on stacking cash, growing my career, and developing economic and material resilience; in off-hours, I embraced the gym, church life, and sports for my family and children, but something happened when I watched a Murdoch Murdoch video and decided, no, I don't want my childrens' futures to be a William Gibson cyberpunk novel, and I want to engage with other people with similar views. What do? Obviously, begin by poasting on the internet! :P

"Psychological Operations" or PsyOps as a term has become outdated for general use - it's too accurate and direct! The new terminology varies - Influence Operations and Countering Disinformation are favorites. On Gab, we just referred to them as "gay ops" or "glow ops," the latter being a riff on the late Terry Davis' "glowie" observation - "the CIA niggers glow in the dark; you can see them if you're driving. You just run them over."

RIP to a real one

The organizations publicly admitting to "monitoring online extremism" and engaging in these influence ops on Gab are large and well-funded. It's not dissuading to learn that the Harvarr Kennedy School for Being a Libtard was only one of dozens of organizations which spent millions of dollars to read my poasts and attempt to take me out of the fight - it's empowering! They sought to neutralize me through demoralization, distraction through endless typing, blackpilling into a weird ultra-Zionist "They Control Everything" form of antisemitism, spinning on a hamster wheel of reality-denying mental illness, radicalizing to domestic terrorism and managed by Professor Raoul X (me? Never! This is an account of peace), recruitment into a federally-run Satanic cult and semi-consensual anal sex, or showing my commitment to Trve Aryanism by going to Ukraine and dying for ZOG. Instead, I confirmed that I was smarter than them, had better arguments and rhetoric, could more effectively persuade others, and that they weren't any more intimidating than the run of the mill shitlibs I used to reck in debates in college, while also being able to, uh, physically resolve any potential conflict with them in my favor should it come to that. The various projects and efforts ebbed and flowed based upon the origin of the operations, with much of the most critical effort dropping off within a few months of the Bidanmans "election" thanks to their funding drying up - shocking! - though the Ukraine op persisted despite little interest, their paid asset(s) burning any credibility they may have had in the past openly and quite amusingly, now shells of their former selves. KYS

It's all quite comical, in retrospect, particularly since we were just people who wanted to talk about reality or play video games, and they wouldn't let us just enjoy that. No, they had to make war on us, drive a guy to (redacted), and cause several suicides through doxings and federal attention. Now we know, as this was all done in the open, and the small, focused, niche setting of Gab provided little cover, as it rarely had more than a few thousand active users aside from periodic surges, such as late 2016/early 2017 with the Trump victory and the last huge surge in January 2021 driven by bannings from the mainstream social media sites for talking about J6, the steal, Fenty Floyd and COVID. Gab was our Wheel of Pain, and hundreds, if not thousands, of us survived and emerged strong, resilient, and committed to lawfully legal battle for the future of ourselves and our posterity.

This essay does not claim that "we are better Noticers for having been on Gab." This is not about standard "noticing" or the Spirit of the Age. The guys riding the tiger on normie social media are equally robust in this regard, and the Middle American Radical has been a known thing since before I was born. I'm specifically detailing the methods used on all social media but were easily rooted out in Gab's walled garden, because there were never more than a few delusional libtards who just wanted to yell at people and call them racist. A vast swath of the user base was COMPLETELY FAKE. Grinding on the hellsite known to us as Blab, normal people honed our noticing skills with breakneck speed and used that to determine when to employ rhetoric vs. dialectic, who is worthy of debate (people who agree with us 80%) vs. ridicule (enemies and normies). Now the critique will come - many learned that on the platform stupidly renamed X, too! Well, some did, certainly, but it sure doesn't appear that the conversion rate was nearly as high as on Blab. Why? Stupidly Renamed's massive, normie-centric, global nature has always provided more cover and noise to obscure its intent for the general user, as there are open enemies and sportsball-in-bio normies everywhere. Gab's small size and niche audience, which the enemy had to pose as to be effective, made such enemy activity obvious, which led to much quicker conversion, and higher conversion rates, among its genuine users.

First and Most Obvious - Bot Network Boosters

Everyone knows that developing a following on social media takes time, although in the early days of Gab the "follow back" was totally normal - "LIKE and SUBSCRIBE if you AGREE!" However, Gab follow rates were insane - I was getting follower counts well above what my engagement and OC called for. I didn't port over from Twitter and communicate with any network of people when I set up my Gab account, unlike a lot of folks - it was a raw persona, developed with a burner email address which had never been associated with my name or any memetic elements I'd ever employed. Brand new ground rarely drives follow rates like I saw, especially given the smallness of the commun-i-tay on Gab, but at the time I simply shrugged. Another thing I noticed was the crazy follower counts for "established Twitter Right influencers" such as Cernovich, Vox Day and the like; there was hockey-stick growth and while I found them cringe, I was ready to chalk it up to the bad taste of the normie. And then I found myself following these accounts, although I'd never done so. More cringe - unfollowed! How did that happen?

I cannot recall exactly when I learned to click on the profile of commenters to my poasts to gauge who they were, but it was soon. Coming from highly evolved social cliques in the forum world, where you'd know everyone you'd engage with, who was smart but a little off his rocker, and it wasn't unusual for a mod to crash the entire forum with no survivors, it was a bit nuts to have randos replying to my replies, or just being inappropriately profane. Why is this guy mad? Ah, he's a boomer yelling at tha TeeVee, which I'm so based I don't own - he's screaming at the person in the screenshot in the post I'm quoting and commenting on. Morons are one thing, but I found myself fairly quickly getting brigaded by accounts poorly espousing a really gay version of American boomer conservatism, with accounts which looked like caricatures of boomer conservatives. Indeed, they were simply copying and pasting incoherent talking points, often only vaguely connected to the original point. Often, a post or comment with massive engagement would have an impression count not much different from a normal post that was only engaged with by mutuals. I'd get a high like-to-comment ratio, without mutuals commenting, and it wouldn't make sense, although the hot retail political topics of the current news cycle would drive engagement, it seemed odd. I began to suspect bot activity and faked traffic reports, given the differences between what I saw in the official Gab usage reports and what I was seeing on the ground, thanks to my professional background. I know a little something about the funnel, SEO, pay to play and so on, and this was only verified by smart users who investigated even deeper and made effortpoasts about the variances in what they saw. Some of the bot networks were positively reinforcing bland political tastes, and others were swarming users with comments and attacks from accounts whose authenticity didn't withstand much scrutiny.

The typical botnet account would have no original posts on their profile, only reposts from "bigger accounts," but the reposts would be a little incoherent - for example, pro-israel content and hardcore White Nationalist wasn't unusual. Their comments would be inconsistent with the spirit of the reposts, and would primarily be divisive or insulting, or attacking people with a viewpoint which they'd reposted. Most importantly, their attention would be triggered by negative engagement with certain "bigger accounts," particularly really fake and gay ones.

NEXT TIME - shill and bot account indicators Their Techniques and Goals