One of the biggest signs that COVID is a real threat is the low-quality propaganda that’s been working non-stop for the past 5 years to convince us all that it’s not. You know what I’m talking about. This poster put it best: https://x.com/jakovmrc/status/...

Of course, I will start by recognizing that a certain percentage are really just mentally ill people. And some are far-right-wingers (not really that different) who got traumatized by what they perceived as “government overreach”...

...when their government did things at the start of a pandemic to protect them, like telling them to wear masks in public, stay home, and take vaccines, and they never moved on from that, and now they’re on a crusade to make sure “it never happens again”.

These people are dumb, they don’t understand public health, and they are basically enemies of social life. But they’re not who we’re talking about here. But these “real people” account for maybe less that 1% of the minimizer accounts on this site...

We all know that there is some very serious funding behind all of this. We see the effort going into it. This amount of effort does not get spent on anything without serious funding. If you didn’t already know, today I will teach you a new key word: “Astroturfing”.

First of all, simply the Wikipedia page on Astroturfing is a must-read for a very good introduction into the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Filled with examples and references, this one page is enough to read any newcomer down a week-long rabbit hole.

I grew up on the internet. I’ve been using it daily, for most of my day, for more than 30 years. I know how things work and what people “naturally” spend their time on. I know what’s advertising and what’s propaganda. I know how to separate bots and paid operators.

The attention we’re seeing on COVID-related discussions from minimizers is 100% paid propaganda. I’m begging you to read that Wikipedia article I shared above. We know this is a real thing that happens, we have basically unlimited proven examples of it from the past.

Sp who are the Astroturfs? Let’s take a good look at some common Astroturf accounts that are being used to minimize COVID. These are all going to be accounts that I encountered and sampled myself, out here in the wild.

Let's take a look at some accounts first. Because they all look the same. I'm going to post a few below, let me know when you notice the pattern. Attribute, adjective, low followers, created recently, weird machine-created user ID. Stupid fucking avatar that no one would pick.

Adjectives, adjectives, definitely not true. Weird location. No followers. Created recently (this screenshot was taken in 2023 or so) but made almost 8000 posts in about a year. That would make like 20+ posts per day.

Sometimes, they have a few more followers. But as you can see, everything else is the same. They also often have "No DMs". They also love claiming they're ex-military.

Retard, Malicious, Infection-lover. NO DMs!

They also love AI-generated images. Another dead giveaway is a love of cryptocurrency, and sports. I will explain why these two in particular.

When these accounts get created, they first need to "pump them up" before they start spewing their propaganda, to make them appear more real. Crpyto and sports are two areas that are ripe for this purpose. The operators make hundreds of replies in these and boost their post count

They are both popular, low-impact topics where everyone has an opinion and no one gets invalidated. Most are bots already, everyone is saying something, none of it matters, and so the comment section of any sports or crypto related post is just a primordial soup of bot accounts.

Evergreen post about this, but for me it doesn't dispel the anger. https://x.com/chamebarne/statu...

Again, it's super important to understand the mindset of the average Astroturf account.

Operators have spreadsheets. Accounts are created, a persona is created for each of them. Who this "person" is, what they're supposed to be interested in, where they're posting from. It's not super complicated either, very low-effort bullshit.

Here's a video I recorded off my screen back in November last year. Notice the non-stop posting they engage in. No one lives like this. They both claim we're the ones "obsessed with covid", and at the same time, spend hours and hours on the internet posting about covid!

Once again, if "no one cares", and we're "in a cult", and we're "brainwashed", why are you spending 8 hours a day posting the exact same senteces under every post you find? They search for keywords, find the posts, and reply under them.

Posting this one just for the lulz. Homie forgot to log out of his main.

They search for keywords, post something under it, then they log the link of their post in their little spreadsheet, because they later send those spreadsheets with their posting history to their employer as proof of their work, to get paid.

Some accounts are bots. These used to be simpler scripts pulling from a pool of pre-written sentences. For example, you can have lines like: "Covid is over / You're brainwashed / Stop living in fear / it's the jab / you sound vaccinated" and you can pick any 2 and make a post.

It's so easy to write a script that can do that. Mind you, this is all pre-LLM era. LLMs existed, but they weren't good or accessible. All you had to do was receive your list of arguments to be made from your employer, run your script, and it would give you what to copy-paste.

Again, all of this happens. We know governments do this. We know marketing agencies do this. We know private interest groups do this. There are hundreds of thousands of people whose job it is to do this. Each operator is able to post at least once or twice a minute, often more.

Another giveaway: Blue checkmarks. Let's talk a bit about them.

As you know, Elon Musk ruined the entire concept by turning it from something to identify publicly known people, to turning it into a "VIP user" badge.

However, another *very* important change that Musk made was to implement a *payout* function for accounts enabled with blue checkmarks.

This created a win-win relationship between the social media platform and the astroturfs. The platform got more engagement, while the turfs got paid. In many deals, the turfs got paid regardless by their employer, but the additional income from Twitter sweetened the deal.