Twitter Trolls and "Hackers"

Our right-wing, anti-choice "friends" have a new tactic on Twitter. They're effectively hijacking accounts. For example:

There's a guy on Twitter calling himself "Realtin Connor" (@RealtinConnor). He's been around for about 5 years, and he's pro-choice. In the middle of September, another account appeared, calling himself "Ryan Cooley" (@RealtinConnor1). His first tweet is September 14, although he retweeted a couple of things from September 11.

I came into this story yesterday, when the new one, Ryan Cooley, followed me. Never met either one before this. But I always check people before I follow back, and I noticed that most of Cooley's tweets were "my original account has been hacked. Please report @RealtinConnor." But I've been seeing a lot of douchebags running around Twitter lately, and didn't think I should just take this new guy at his word.

After all, let's use Occam's Razor: what is easier to do? To hack somebody else's account? Or to set up a fake account?

So I scrolled through both timelines. The most obvious difference is that "Realtin Connor" reads more like a real person - he can be a little bit of a dick, but he actually interacts with people, making decent arguments and seems to believe in what he's saying.

On the other hand, "Ryan Cooley" (the one with the "1" after the username) has a fairly shallow timeline. He retweets from a limited number of sources, and makes bad arguments. His tweets seem more like someone pretending to be pro-choice, but not really believing it.

His first two "original" tweets (not retweets) aren't really the words of someone furious because his Twitter account has been stolen (or even particularly feminist).

Some of his retweets are... let's call them "inartfully phrased." The type of tweets that someone who is virulently anti-abortion would think was indicative of the pro-choice movement, but more reasonable people look at and think "Oh, honey. You could have said that better."

He made the somewhat lame excuse that he could prove he was the original, because he NEVER makes typos.
Then there's this interesting little exchange between some rabid anti-abortion types.

That link, by the way, is to an anti-abortion blog which tries to dox Realtin Connor as Ryan Cooley. This is presumably when @RealtinConnor1 started calling himself "Ryan Cooley."

(Now, a quick philosophical question - why would the anti-abortion type not report both names, if both are pro-choice? Collusion, perhaps? Just a thought...)

Shortly after that, he got his standard whine a little bit backward at least once.

The part that I find the most suspicious is that he had several interactions with "Tom LaRue," who has been targeting and harassing several pro-choice women in the last few days. (This example appears to have occurred around the time that Tommy abandoned his old account (@TomReformed) and started a new one (@TomReformed1) - presumably because he was either suspended, or felt he'd been reported a little too often.)


I actually took longer writing this than I'd planned - it just kept getting weirder the more I looked.

This is all circumstantial, but it suggests to me that:

1. Realtin Connor (@RealtinConnor) was never hacked - he has an impersonator.

2. Ryan Cooley (@RealtinConnor1) is the troll in this case.

I don't have the "forensic internet tools" to be sure in this case. But this should be fairly easy for Twitter to establish. Look at the source information from the original account (@RealtinConnor) - location, phone number, email address - prior to September 1. Compare it with the information from both accounts right now. I suspect that the original account will have matching data.

Elementary, my dear Watson.

Early reaction to Twitter

As I might have mentioned, I recently started playing around with Twitter. Sweet Jesus, it's a unique environment. With only 140 characters to play with, it's like swimming in a crowded whirlpool, and having people grab you, yell something in your ear, and get pulled away by the tide.

I'm noticing some various trends among users. I find a lot of them fall into several categories.

There's the celebrities, of course. People famous for being on TV, or in movies, or writing books or whatever. I've heard that 1% of Twitter users are celebrities, but 99% of the other users follow them. Which might be accurate; I don't know. Some celebrities just tweet about their lives. Others try to use their celebrity to promote the things that are important to them, like causes. Or... instagram filters.

Here's a little fact nobody mentions: if you're looking to get more jokes on your feed, comedians are a weird bunch. Many of them will try out jokes on Twitter, but a lot don't seem to want to "waste" them like that - and, really, that's understandable. When you make your living having people pay to hear your jokes, you don't want to give them away for free.

So sometimes you end up with streams from comedians like Iliza Shlesinger (@iliza), who seems to mostly tweet pictures from her Instagram feed. But most often, you get a lot of tweets like "Had a great time tonight, @HeliumComedy in Philly! Thanks for coming out!" or "I'll be headlining at the #ItchyKitty in Reseda tonight! Be sure to stop by! Tickets at the door!"

There are a lot of people who apparently don't have anything to say. All they do is read their stream, and occasionally retweet ("RT") something somebody else has written. They don't tend to add anything to the discussion. But then, just to keep things exciting, I guess, they'll find somebody who looks interesting and poke through their feed. Then they'll favorite or RT a long string of things from that same person, and then, after that brief flurry of activity, I guess they just go back to grazing through their Twitter stream passively, like bipolar cattle.

Trivia: "starbang" is to favorite a lot of tweets in a row (because the symbol for "favorite" is a star, see?). There's probably a similar term for obsessively retweeting somebody else's words, but I haven't run across it yet.

There's also a weird subclass of Twitter users (or maybe even superusers) that seem to have allowed Twitter to take over their lives. They tend to tweet or retweet constantly, and I'm not entirely clear that they do anything else throughout the day.

I mean, I'll tweet some random, semi-funny line every so often, but these people spew unrelated jokes every 15-20 minutes. And then regurgitate a string of retweets, and then back to spewing their own "humor." I guess it's easier than getting a life...

I'm coming to realize that for a good 99% of users, if you follow them, it's best to just turn off the ability to see their retweets. It's just a good policy.

You know all those mindless idiots who believe everything Fox "News" and Sarah Palin spew? Yeah, a lot of them have Twitter accounts. They can be fun for a while - they tend to block you before too long, though. (I wonder if I've been blocked more often than I've been retweeted? That's an interesting question; somebody's got to have an app that'll show those stats...)

There's also a collection of what must be bots out there - programs that just spew whatever tweets they're designed for. There are "users" who just tweet ads for random ezines (I'm looking at you, funnient.com); I'm starting to suspect that the entire ad department for a lot of these ezines is a Twitter user sending out promos for their latest slideshow.

Also, if you answer somebody with a quote, you'll suddenly find yourself followed by quotebots (everybody from Gandhi to Marilyn Monroe) - it's weird. (Also, some of these things that claim to be quotebots are just adbots. Go figure.

It's a strange world out there. I'm just sayin'...

Would the future pluperfect tense of "tweet" be "to twat"?

Well, my old phone finally died a few months ago, and I had to get an upgrade. (You know, something made in this century.) Since I've been technologically challenged in this area, I've only now been discovering several things about smartphones. Things that most of America already knows.

1. There are a lot of really stupid free games on the market
2. There's all kinds of ways to stick an ad into an app.
3. Looks like I can text after all.
4. Man, cellphone batteries suck.

Oh, and it seems there's this app called "Twitter." Have you heard of it?

I have to assume that since I've discovered it, that means it's no longer popular. But I'm noticing that once you get past that initial learning curve, it's can be a little bit addictive.

The biggest challenge for me is restricting myself to 140 characters. Particularly since I have a serious disdain for Twitterspeak.

I'm not a 13-year-old girl. I refuse to use "4" instead of "for." I like punctuation. And someday I might resort to "b/c" to mean "because," but this is not that day.

But it can be a real time-suck. I'm going to have to monitor that. I'm getting older. There's only so many hours left in my life, much less in a day.

But hey, look me up if you're there. (@NamelessCynic, just like it says up there at the top of the page.)

I'll probably even follow you back, if your feed isn't boring.