Recently, I have been working on the algorithmic health of my X account. For years, I’ve been convinced that even when Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022, they forgot to take me off the shadow-ban list. However, I recently did something I promised never to do: I bought one of those paid blue-check subscriptions so people will stop mistaking me for a Nigerian bot. 

I also went through my follower list and tried to block or delete all the Nigerian (and Malaysian and Egyptian, etc.) scammers and spammers asking me to subscribe to their OnlyFans. 

My past philosophy on fake followers was the more the merrier. Any artificial boost of my follow count could only make me look good, right?

But my research has led me to conclude that having phony followers was actually hurting my algorithmic amplification. It seems engagement is factored as a percentage of one’s overall follow count, so those lucky enough to get one or two likes or retweets per post but who also have a lot of fake accounts are more likely to see their posts get buried. 

Painfully, I began to cull my list down, only to discover that about a quarter (at least) of my followers were completely fake. 

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Some used sophisticated methods, such as the Africa-based guy pretending to be a disabled U.S. Army veteran, who managed to grow, shave, and regrow a beard (along with an impressive mullet) within the span of nine days last December before he promptly stopped posting. 

Convincing though he may have been, the red flags were there. 

A Virtual Cloward–Piven?

The process sent me down a rabbit hole of wondering who is really doing this, and why? 

Are they really that successful at duping people into engaging with them, or is the whole point of this nefarious subterfuge to regulate the traffic flow of X? And if so, who pays people to sit around all day creating these accounts? 

I know that AI advances are doing amazing things, like helping people add Trump face tattoos to their profile pics, but surely AI has better things to do with its time — like plotting world domination — than to spend all day spamming people.

The dark thought crossed my mind that the same people bankrolling these bot farms are the ones sowing real-life havoc all over Western Europe. Just as the caravans of illegal aliens have done through shoddy immigration policies (or lack thereof), these bots may be part of a backdoor Cloward–Piven scheme to lie dormant until just the right moment and then flood the zone in order to overwhelm the entire system.

Is it any wonder that commie ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich (who missed his true calling as a lawn jockey at the Eagle’s Nest) is now scheming to socialize Elon Musk’s companies?

It’s only a matter of time before Reich and his Berkeley cohorts insist that Musk’s rocket cars come with a mandatory “kill switch” allowing authorities to shut down the boosters mid-flight.

Censors of the World, Unite

But the Fourth “Reich” isn’t the only one scheming to use institutional force to neutralize his political adversaries. 

An alarming call went out recently in Australia to give the leftist Anthony Albanese government the power to create government-controlled bot accounts, expressly for the purpose of manipulating online dialogue to silence critics. 

It would have flown entirely under the radar but for the valiant efforts of investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger to expose it.

Shellenberger subsequently called out the French government for pivoting to those same authoritarian impulses in order to contain the ongoing Antifa riots, which ironically are the result of years of reckless immigration policies from the Macronistas now seeking to quell any debate. 

And, of course, the very first thing that Brazilian dictator Lula da Silva called for in his desperate bid to legitimize his stolen election on Sunday was a crackdown on social-media criticism. 

It all points in the same direction to a pattern of left-wing destabilization.

A Constant Cycle of Confusion

In short, it may be a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenario: Either we suffer the Nigerian scam-bots that are using a sort of algorithmic heckler’s veto to deamplify discourse, or we give the government control to pick and choose who is legitimate, and to silence legitimate criticism (yet again) through self-serving censorship.

This same free-speech paradox has been playing out recently in conservative circles after DataRepublican’s massively viral series of reports exposing (yet another) dark-money-backed seditious conspiracy to hamstring the Trump administration’s ability to respond to well-coordinated riots and civil unrest intended to meddle in our own upcoming U.S. elections. 

Amid calls for accountability, those caught in the plot, such as Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), are now performing acts of contrition, even scrambling to engage MAGA influencers in a debate over which side is doing the seditioning. 

While some see no reason to validate an enemy that is bent on our suppression and ultimate destruction, others argue that to refuse to consider counterarguments would be to play right into their hands by becoming that which we condemn. 

The sophisticated psy-ops now underway to sow chaos and confusion by way of circular reasoning are enough to make one yearn for the days when the so-called Nigerian princes who ruled over inboxes were easy to spot, and their motives were obvious: to make money off stupid people (present company excepted if any scam victims happen to be reading this).

As for any bots who may be reading this, no, I will not follow your OnlyFans accounts, whatever those are. But if more conservative influencers start hopping on the bandwagon, I guess I’ll have to make one, too.