For months, the Erica Marsh account had raised suspicions among online misinformation experts due to her lack of a real-world footprint and her devotion to attention-grabbing viewpoints one called “cartoonishly liberal.”

“I strongly suspect that this person doesn’t exist,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto who studies online disinformation. “It’s as if she dropped from the moon and arrived fully formed with this narrative that makes liberals look like idiots.”

  • SkepticElliptic@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I’ve seen Fake accounts on my local FB group pretending to be black women and saying stupid) abhorrent things in order to bait/reaffirm conservatives. Sometimes it will be another fake account that responds to them to “own” them.

    I live in an area that is heavily targeted by Dan Profit funded by Richard Uihlein.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if they paid a firm in SE Asia or other cheap labor place to target local groups. They went through the trouble of producing dozens of fake newspapers and mailing them to millions of people last election.