Influence Operations on Gab, Part Three

Glowie and Shill Account Indicators. The End!

Influence Operations on Gab, Part One

Influence Operations on Gab, Part Two

Let's revisit why I'm taking the time to write this series. Yes, it's therapeutic to discuss one's experiences and feelings - thank you for letting me talk about my feelings - but the value to others is in sharing the experience and observations to understand the past, present and future. Every single hot-button political discussion taking place online is flooded with responses from glowie and shill accounts misrepresenting themselves as regular people, just like you! The goal is to dupe you into silence, or to passively hold a position which favors them - to accept their narrative that, for example, it's perfectly acceptable for the US to continue escalating against Russia, or for israel to continue bombing their neighbors. After all, @TexasRancher00 seems like a perfectly normal Hard Working American, who just so happens to post strictly about israel!

israel is a special case here because of the vast resources that country has committed to the war for your mind. All trve poasters know about the JIDF, a purportedly defunct (but continuing under other names) organization of Israelis who volunteer to fib on the internet to win hearts and minds, particularly in machine translated, poorly transcribed English. The things they've done to our beautiful language is merely another of their unending series of war crimes! The obvious tells associated with machine translation that you'll see in their phony posts, such as spaces between the last character of a sentence and the punctuation, remain prevalent. I've spoken with a jewish convert to Orthodox Christianity who'd spent some time volunteering for the JIDF in college; he confirmed my suspicions that they would simply open a spreadsheet with the talking points for the day by topic and their assigned accounts on various sites. They were told to copy-paste and modify slightly where necessary to direct the topic from what is being discussed to the intended message, with most volunteers not being fluent in English and reliant upon machine translation. It was particularly common for British English spelling to be used, as well as non-American idiomatic language, which he agreed was a constant problem that the volunteers simply didn't understand or care about. Indeed, much of this work is subbed out to the subcontinent, where the work is especially shoddy and such issues even more glaring; those high time preference correspondents can be made to break character even more easily than the eternal wanderers.

These goofy shill profiles, which ape mid-2010s boomer conservative aesthetics, often exhibit indicators of an API integration feeding content to the profile. This enables a stream of curated content to the profile page, while an assigned person or persons reply to engagement with the poasts.

Here's a classic example - "Brigadier General R.H. Kaufmann" - of course no such person ever existed and the bio reads like the ramblings of a moron with no military experience attempting to sound authentic and tuff. All OPs are links to an off-brand news aggregator site, the URLs and site almost certainly capturing information about the user who naively clicks through. The replies vary between normie conservative and completely unhinged caricature. Note that this account has made no reply to any post since the November 2024 election, but the likely API-fed OPs continue.

Another shill account with a formerly more subtle approach comes from the NATO sphere, "Ann Kelly," who pretends to be a BASED pro-European White Nationalist promoting the EU and NATO against mass third world immigration but went full mask off when Russia invaded Ukraine. It's even more comical now, promoting a BASED pan-European defense of civilization against the browns in Iran.

Accounts in the Ann Kelly sphere - pro-Ukraine White Nationalists with a taste for NSDAP aesthetics and edginess - are given permission to use normally-forbidden slurs so long as they stick to certain talking points. At some point in about 2020, they were ordered to accuse people of being jews and to use various slurs.

Another case in point. See, he doesn't trust what the US says about Russia, although he's obsessed with proving that Ukraine is the Aryan European good guy, and the Russians are the Asiatic hordes. Those who witnessed it will never forget his reposting a clause-for-clause restatement of Lloyd Austin's pro-Ukraine position on the very same day, at the behest of his masters. I hope this known doxer's submission to NATO pains him every single day.

Another great example of the "based veteran who shills for US involvement in various globohomo wars" is the unfortunately named @Loadtaker, surely a machine translation victim who has never acknowledged the amusing turn of phrase inherent in their user name.

Now that the website stupidly renamed X is no longer suppressing some of the old topics and talking points, Gab is nearly a ghost site, so the shills have moved with the audience back to X (where they are currently engaged in full-spectrum support for war against Iran). It's almost quaint to talk about Gab now, the oft-vilified site which got so much attention during the first Trump administration, but there were indeed tremendous resources directed at both studying and influencing the discussion taking place. Examples:

A George Washington University study published in 2019 revealed what we all knew - most accounts on Gab were made by people banned from other social media who would check it out for a few days, rarely if ever poast, and then never come back. The Third International Workshop on Cybersafety, Online Harrassment, and Misinformation (whew!) produced What is Gab? A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber? with contributions by Cypress University of Technology, the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, University College London, Qatar Computing Research Institute & Hamad Bin Khalifa University (providing a Korean contributor, at that), and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Globohomo was deeply concerned about establishing a stranglehold upon online discussion.

The Pew Research Center published a very late report on October 6, 2022 titled The Role of Alternative Social Media in the News and Information Environment, which makes me laugh, because their financiers and political backers shifted their focus back to Trump after the events precisely 366 days later. Sucks to suck!

The Gab Project: The Methodological, Epistemological, and Legal Challenges of Studying the Platformized Far-Right was published in the UC Berkeley Journal of Right-Wing Studies, July 2024 based upon a five-year study conducted by the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, Erasmus University in Germany. Interestingly, one contributor was Melissa Blekkenhorst, a Policy Officer at the Netherlands' Ministry of the Interior, and the heavy focus upon European users within the study hints at grant funding having an EU governmental origin. Again - nobody cared about Gab by 2024, at which point their branch of globohomo had lost most of its American backing.

PLATFORMIZED

In Conclusion

Thank you for allowing me to talk about my feelings. I’ve long planned to write a brief historiography of Blab Dot Com, but the new surge in obvious influence ops regard Missile Strikes In Tel Aviv To Study and Relax To focused my attention upon this specific topic. The struggle to influence you, to subvert you, and to demoralize you still rages. Stay in the fight, know the techniques, and look for new ones; always call them out. Never give up. Never die.