This anonymous Twitter account got a big following for tweeting out pandemic content in 2021 and 2022. It’s mostly inactive now, but it was proven to be acting inauthentically.
The account was outed for being inauthentic after a couple of other accounts documented the plagiarizing tweets of sammy4723 — tweets where the account had been copying tweets verbatim from other people’s accounts, without attribution and acting like they were their own.
This is just a selection of the dozens of examples of copypasta tweets. Apparently the person or people running this account had a habit of troll replying using some ant fungus GIF meme.
The sammy4723 account woke up briefly in December 2023 to boost a bunch of other accounts that were posting about the Colorado Supreme Court Trump case at the time. Mostly just retweeting liberal and never trump retweet content from political content accounts.
There is an assortment of political content posted to the account in 2021, and some posting prior to that.
I’m reviewing this account because it’s an obvious example of an anonymous trolling account that deals in a particular niche topic, gains a big following, then behaves inappropriately in ways that some people see and some don’t, some care about and some don’t, because of the nature of social media silos, and then the account switches topics and start boosting something else, and later someone realizes they’re following this weird scammy account that they don’t agree with at all. So this isn’t some special account. It’s probably someone’s alt account. They’re not particularly savvy in the grand scheme of The Internet of Fakes. Years ago they tweeted out a connected account that has a real photo profile pic that looked fairly real, of a person with a muscular arm and 5 o’clock shadow wearing sunglasses and interacting with what looks like a small dog. Still, the Twitter account is definitely sketchy looking.
Of course the truth is that the account was always weird, and others noted it besides me, but the people who followed often didn’t care if the account looked dubious because they were saying funny or agreeable things, so people don’t notice that they’re dubious until they start saying things that people really don’t think are funny or agreeable anymore. I know this because as soon as I spotted this account in 2021, I started trying to warn people the account was peculiar — but some of the replies I got were along the lines of “Well he’s got a big big popular account and follows me so I don’t want to be rude.” It might seem that these people were just about the mutual boosting and clout chasing, and that’s probably true for many, sorry to say but yeah, people put social media feedback above truth or right lots. But at least in some cases some people really took following this account personally and felt human kindness for whoever they thought was running the account, because I saw multiple instances of people trying to reply old tweets of this account, asking if they’re ok, after they stopped posting in December 2022, when they had finally been called out over and over again.
More people were calling this account out 6 months later. People who either hadn’t gotten teh news in June 2022, or perhaps it hadn’t bothered them at the time. One person who posted directly about it was someone named Rob DuMont on December 21, 2023.
I’m not sure why Rob Dumont signed off on granting people the permission to continue following the dodgy plagiarizing account. Why would you want to after learning this? My guess is, DuMont put it that way not wanting to incur the rage of the sammy4723 account’s most devoted followers. For some reason that amount of followers gets respect, even though it could easily be inauthentically manufactured by troll farms and botnets. I’m sure several people tried to warn others privately about this first, and faced the same strange dug-in-don’t-care attitude that I did from some people. “Don’t dare criticize my problematic faves!” seems to be common, as does social media addiction, and some aggregating troll accounts are very good at keeping people hooked, even while they behave badly, sometimes because they behave badly. I had mistakenly thought once the plagiarism was revealed, people would wake up and block this account, but not so. In fact, to this day many big hotshot covid twitter accounts are still following this dodgy plagiarizing account.
I contacted or attempted to contact most of these people several times before about this account, so I’m not just gratuitously outing people. People continue following garbage accounts for all sorts of reasons, no matter how embarrassing it might be. I myself appreciate when people at me or DM to tell me I’m following a dubious account. But some people lash out at the messenger who dares to deliver the news. I’ve had some real sad interactions with people over the years on stuff like this.
You might think this says something about the followers, and maybe it does in some cases. In one case the person unfollowed the sammy4723 account after I told them about it, but here they are back on the followers list 2 years later. At least 2 of the accounts listed appear to be no longer very active on twitter if at all as well. But I still think this is instructional to demonstrate how even bigshot accounts, including professionals using social media in a perhaps quasi professional capacity, can get drawn into following and boosting weird, strange, and unethical anonymous accounts. And yes, in some cases become so attached to the entertaining content put out by weird political sock puppet accounts, that they’re willing to take the hit on how it probably looks to be following some of the more bizarre and dodgy accounts, even after they’re told about it.
And yes, it’s very possible the account is an alt account of someone who follows this account, but I have no evidence of that to present, and the profile photo I found on the connected account doesn’t match up with anything I’ve seen on any accounts I know about. And I haven’t posted that here at this time because I don’t think it’s relevant to the story I’m trying to convey here, which is not just about sammy4723.
This is about the internet as it has become. Garbage in, garbage out. It’s bad enough with human run troll farms and click farms, but now the output of real websites, and books, not just social media, is being edited by faulty plagiarizing chatbots, and they’re suggesting we do this with scientific research now to turn the science journals into SEO click farms. Why would anyone want to live in this kind of cesspool of an information landscape? I don’t, it’s giving me bad dreams.
There are many reasons people have anonymous accounts online or even alt accounts, that are defensible and innocent. But it does mean that diligence and paying attention is more important, and that’s a scarce behaviour on social media. The problem with anonymous accounts, is that once someone believes themselves to be anonymous on the internet (and I would caution everyone to never assume such a thing is possible), they are sometimes tempted to say things they ordinarily wouldn’t or do things that are not socially acceptable if you have to put your name on it. Another phenomenon is that once someone gets a lot of attention online, audience capture starts setting in to keep it all rolling. The other problem with anonymous accounts is the potential for thousands and thousands of inauthentic botnets and trolls that serve to exist to make people think there’s a consensus or that something is popular when it’s not, or unpopular when it really is (pluralistic ignorance) — it’s just that real people aren’t speaking up, but all the paid PR mouthpieces and a bunch of anonymous botnets online are speaking up, and some industries and billionaires just have endless money to invest in The Internet of Fakes.