Millionaire Poso
Twitter continues to enable neo-Nazi collaborator, Jack Posobiec
Jack Posobiec, a correspondent with One American News Network (OANN), recently celebrated surpassing a million Twitter Followers by changing his account’s display name to “Millionaire Poso.”
Social Forensics did some sleuthing last month which surfaced that Posobiec, along with Mike Cernovich, share hundreds of thousands of fake Twitter Followers.
Before reading any further, I would implore you all to check out The Southern Poverty Law Center’s investigation into Posobiec, a summary of which may be found here.
What’s to follow will be an analysis of accounts that recently followed Posobiec, propelling him past the million Followers mark over Labor Day weekend (Social Forensics collected Posobiec’s most recent 50K Followers earlier this week and right after he transformed into superhero, “Millionaire Poso”).
For starters, here’s a daily summary of Posobiec’s Followers count, spanning from August 28th, 2020 through today, September 10th, 2020:
As may be seen above, Posobiec eclipsed a million Followers on Tuesday, September 8th — a day on which his account gained more than 8 thousand Followers, which is 4 times the number of daily Followers Posobiec has averaged recently.
Taking a closer look into Posobiec’s most recent 50 thousand Followers reveals a highly suspect, low-quality set of accounts.
Account Creation Dates
More than one-third of Posobiec’s recent Followers are accounts that were created this year (44% are accounts with creation dates of either 2019 or 2020):
Followers Distribution
More than 80% (40,417 accounts) of Posobiec’s recent Followers are accounts that have fewer than 200 Followers (nearly 36 thousand are accounts that have fewer than 100 Followers):
Eric Trump
Most notable among recent accounts to follow “Millionaire Poso” was President Trump’s son, Eric:
Seems Eric Trump — who follows less than a thousand accounts — recently decided to follow a number of highly-esteemed individuals.
In addition to following Posobiec, Eric recently opted to follow Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican QAnon-supporting congressional candidate from Georgia, who is poised to bring the far-right, anti-Semitic collective delusion to Congress.
It is also worth noting that President Trump’s other son, Donald Trump Jr., has been Following Posobiec’s Twitter account since prior to July 2017 (Trump Jr. was among the first 200 accounts to follow Posobiec).
Posobiec has referred to Trump Jr. as being “redpilled [as fuck]” in private messages:
OK, So What’s Your Point?
Blue check marks paired with large Followers counts are formidable weapons for propagandists.
Twitter’s decision to maintain the account verification of “far-right conspiracy-mongers” who happen to be in good favor with the Trump Administration is a direct assault against democracy. Moreover, Twitter’s refusal to remove the hundreds of thousands of fake accounts that inflate the Followers counts of Cernovich and Posobiec — including thousands of which are QAnon accounts — illustrates how Twitter’s stated policies don’t align with their actions.
The time to regulate Big Tech was yesterday; the second best time is now.
Social Forensics maps and monitors social connections and activity.
We create purposefully designed tools to manage social data analytics needs across various industries. Our focus is audience segmentation and identifying coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) across social media platforms.
Geoff Golberg is an NYC-based researcher (and entrepreneur) who is fascinated by graph visualization/network analysis — more specifically, when applied to social networks and blockchain activity. His experience spans structured finance, ad tech, and digital marketing/customer acquisition, both at startups and public companies.
Geoff is the Founder/CEO/Janitor of Social Forensics.
