A Note to My Readers: What Happened After
Emergency Dispatch
Today I published a piece about the virtuecratic machine. I did not expect what came next.
In the hours following publication, I began noticing something in the patterns of engagement — a certain coordination among accounts, a togetherness that felt less like organic ideological response and more like something else. I have spent enough time in systems to recognize when behavior is architected.
So I ran an experiment. I made contact with some of these accounts. I offered money for candor.
Something bit.
What I learned, in direct conversation, is that at least some of the accounts engaging in today’s operations are Americans — young, economically precarious, living on the margins of a system they already distrust — who are being paid to do this work. One source confirmed being paid between $800 and $1,100 a month to engage in coordinated influence activity on platforms including Bluesky.
I want to be precise about what I am saying and what I am not saying.
What I am saying: there is a paid operation, and today it targeted me.
What I suspect, based on the patterns I observed and the context in which this kind of operation typically functions: this is not purely domestic. My analytical judgment — and I offer it as judgment, not yet as documented fact — is that what I encountered today has the signatures of influence operations with Chinese and Russian origins, recruiting economically vulnerable Americans as their ground-level operators. These governments have documented histories of exactly this playbook: find people who already hate the system, pay them modest sums, point them at targets.
I am continuing this investigation. I have a collaborator. There will be more.
I also want to say something directly to any American citizen who is caught up in this work: I am not your enemy. I understand the economic conditions that make this kind of offer appealing. My interest is in exposing the operations and the governments behind them — not in destroying the lives of Americans who got recruited into something they may not fully understand. If you want out, or if you want to talk, I am reachable.
One more thing. Some of what emerged in these conversations tonight was serious enough — specific enough, threatening enough — that I have already reported it to the FBI. I am a citizen of these United States before I am anything else, and that comes with obligations I take seriously.
More soon.
Exactly. This is what I was getting at earlier- it's hard to engage in good faith anonymously without really knowing who they are (and if they are American). Your experiment is pointing to something I've long wondered about. So, I'm interested in hearing more
Confirms what I’ve been increasingly seeing and occasionally pointing out on BlueSky. Prior to the 2024 election, I’d worked with NAFO folks in their efforts to mass-report troll accounts engaging in this kind of engineered social media manipulation. For a time, it worked on Twitter…until Elon fully destroyed the algorithm and any real accountability leading up to the election. And because of that, around & following the inauguration, increasingly more folks fled X for BlueSky…and the sockpuppets & trolls weren’t far behind, pursuing the demographic they’d chased away from X.