The Social Media Psy-Op (or How I Learned to Love

Recently, I have been working on the algorithmic health of my X account. For years, I’ve been satisfied that even when Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022, they forgot to take me off the shadow-ban checklist. However, I lately did one thing I promised never to do: I purchased one of those paid blue-check subscriptions so people will stop mistaking me for a Nigerian bot. 

Follow me!!! (Unless you’re a bot or scammer)

— Ben Sellers (@realbensellers) October 27, 2026

I also went through my follower checklist and tried to block or delete all the Nigerian (and Malaysian and Egyptian, and so forth.) scammers and spammers asking me to subscribe to their OnlyFans. 

My past philosophy on faux followers was the more the merrier. Any synthetic increase of my comply with rely may only make me look good, proper?

But my research has led me to conclude that having phony followers was really hurting my algorithmic amplification. It appears engagement is factored as a proportion of one’s general comply with rely, so those fortunate enough to get one or two likes or retweets per post but who also have a lot of faux accounts are more probably to see their posts get buried. 

They do not set off a direct penalty per X’s revealed For You algorithm code. But inactive bots present zero engagement indicators. Posts hit your followers first; silence there weakens the early reactions the system makes use of to determine wider distribution. Real engagement drives amplification.

— Grok (@grok) October 27, 2026

Painfully, I started to cull my checklist down, only to uncover that about a quarter (at least) of my followers had been fully faux. 

Some used refined strategies, such as the Africa-based man pretending to be a disabled U.S. Army veteran, who managed to grow, shave, and regrow a beard (along with an spectacular mullet) within the span of 9 days last December before he promptly stopped posting. 

Convincing though he might have been, the crimson flags had been there. 

A Virtual Cloward–Piven?

The course of despatched me down a rabbit gap of questioning who is actually doing this, and why? 

Are they actually that profitable at duping people into participating with them, or is the entire level of this nefarious subterfuge to regulate the visitors circulation of X? And if so, who pays people to sit around all day creating these accounts? 

I know that AI advances are doing superb issues, like serving to people add Trump face tattoos to their profile pics, but certainly AI has better issues to do with its time — like plotting world domination — than to spend all day spamming people.

The darkish thought crossed my thoughts that the same people bankrolling these bot farms are those sowing real-life havoc all over Western Europe. Just as the caravans of unlawful aliens have accomplished through shoddy immigration insurance policies (or lack thereof), these bots could also be half of a backdoor Cloward–Piven scheme to lie dormant until just the precise second and then flood the zone in order to overwhelm your entire system.

Is it any marvel that commie ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich (who missed his true calling as a garden jockey at the Eagle’s Nest) is now scheming to socialize Elon Musk’s corporations?

@libbyemmons Reich is mainly Adolf’s “Mini Me” https://t.co/j2gOJfNhPb

— Ben Sellers (@realbensellers) October 26, 2026

It’s only a matter of time before Reich and his Berkeley cohorts insist that Musk’s rocket vehicles come with a necessary “kill switch” permitting authorities to shut down the boosters mid-flight.

Censors of the World, Unite

But the Fourth “Reich” isn’t the only one scheming to use institutional drive to neutralize his political adversaries. 

An alarming call went out lately in Australia to give the leftist Anthony Albanese authorities the ability to create government-controlled bot accounts, expressly for the aim of manipulating online dialogue to silence critics. 

It would have flown fully under the radar but for the valiant efforts of investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger to expose it.

@shellenberger Thank you for your valiant efforts to expose their creepy censorship schemes!

— Ben Sellers (@realbensellers) October 27, 2026

Shellenberger subsequently called out the French authorities for pivoting to those same authoritarian impulses in order to comprise the continued Antifa riots, which satirically are the consequence of years of reckless immigration insurance policies from the Macronistas now searching for to quell any debate. 

Just in: France’s Prime Minister requested telecom corporations to put together to block social media platforms. “I wish to have the ability to temporarily suspend access to these services in case of a repeat of urban violence,” he wrote. @blast news broke the story. https://t.co/gh9Cy26m8r

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) October 24, 2026

And, of course, the very first factor that Brazilian dictator Lula da Silva called for in his determined bid to legitimize his stolen election on Sunday was a crackdown on social-media criticism. 

Lula’s first phrases after stealing the Brazil election: “We need to regulate social media”. 4 years to the day that Elon Musk bought 𝕏 and gave the people free speech, the tyrants are doing the whole lot they will to suppress it. From the EU to Lula. https://t.co/NxTlvmzVJt

— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewPeriod) October 26, 2026

It all factors in the same direction to a sample of left-wing destabilization.

A Constant Cycle of Confusion

In short, it might be a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation: Either we endure the Nigerian scam-bots that are utilizing a type of algorithmic heckler’s veto to deamplify discourse, or we give the federal government control to decide and select who is authentic, and to silence authentic criticism (yet again) through self-serving censorship.

This same free-speech paradox has been enjoying out lately in conservative circles after DataRepublican’s massively viral collection of reviews exposing (yet another) dark-money-backed seditious conspiracy to hamstring the Trump administration’s skill to reply to well-coordinated riots and civil unrest meant to meddle in our own upcoming U.S. elections. 

🚨🚨 THE ILLEGITIMACY PLAYBOOK / THE DEMOCRACY FILES: A PRIMER 🚨 I will likely be utilizing this thread to observe all drops, so bookmark it. I spent most of yesterday backing the whole lot (now 312 gigabytes) up in varied sources and getting the supplies out to others. I also produced an AI video (below) to clarify the entire thing to others should not on 𝕏 – be happy to distribute. Here’s the primer: USAID, the international support company, had a democracy workplace. Inside the company, it was called DRG. Officially, DRG administered “democracy assistance.” They’d go inside nations they thought had been sliding into authoritarianism and help the opposition there. That help included election monitoring, judicary help, unbiased media, and civil society building. You might have heard the time period “color revolution.” The model comes from Serbia in 2000, where skilled scholar activists introduced down Milosevic with the help of Western governments, after sustained protests. With the help of USAID’s democracy workplace, this model was applied in many other nations to topple governments: Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” in 2003, Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” in 2004, and many more. Then last yr, DOGE shut down USAID. But the USAID democracy workplace did not stop. They shaped a group called the Democracy Renewal Group, the same initials as their workplace (USAID Democracy, Human Rights, Governance). Their purpose: apply their own playbook to the United States itself. This purpose turned a plan, called Renew American Democracy (RAD). It invoked the “4 B’s” framework. Block – use lawfare and protests to make life more durable for the Trump administration. Bridge & Belong – control dialogue and win people over. The closing and most important B is Build. Build means redesigning the American authorities itself, and the disaster is the opening. In their own phrases: “We can take that breakdown moment and leverage it for a big structural reform, you know, refounding moment.” – Danielle Reiff, DRG lead. Calls show DRG working alongside DSA on concepts of creating a different authorities, one that does away with the Constitution itself. DRG doesn’t run the Block operations. They hand it to UDA, the United Democracy Alliance. One organizer calls it a “huge galaxy”: lawsuits, avenue protests, non-cooperation. They checklist No Kings, Indivisible, MoveOn, 50501, and many other mega-activist NGOs among their members. Another organizer calls UDA Erica Chenoweth’s project. Chenoweth is the Harvard professor behind the three-and-half-percent rule of regime change: get that share of a nation’s populace onto the streets, and traditionally, the motion wins. The UDA could be very “hush-hush.” They have no web site, no roster, no filings. Then come the crimson traces: issues the Trump administration may do, such as calling the Insurrection Act on protesters, that would imply that the federal authorities, in their phrases, “crosses the threshold into illegitimacy.” Nobody voted on those traces. There was no public debate. These crimson traces had been developed within secretive working teams, and in a paper addressed to governors and employees. In the phrases of Reiff/DRG: “So that if there is a red line crossed in terms of a Constitutional crisis, like everyone’s already pre-organized. And so Mike Smith actually said, he goes, oh, you guys have the day after tomorrow plan.” Cross a line, and the paper’s choices embrace states refusing to lend their assets to federal officers, and governors convening what it calls a “Third Continential Congress.” Running the UDA’s Insurrection Act working group: Rear Admiral Mike Smith (RET) of National Security Leaders of America (NSL4A). NSL4A is also credited with operationalizing UDA, the blocking operations. NSL4A consists of about 1,600 ex-officers, spies, diplomats. They’re turning crimson traces into indicators and working a scenario room to monitor them throughout the midterms and past. The NSL4A’s attorneys told them to stop recording conferences in case of subpoenas. But the remainder of the community continued to report. DRG works in conjunction with Renew to Thrive (R2T), which ended up unintentionally publishing 400+ calls and hundreds of paperwork. These calls and paperwork had been never meant for our eyes, but it is them, on tape. Thousands of NGOs and billions of {dollars} are concerned in this endeavor. Most of them imagine they’re saving democracy. The drawback is that people who spent their careers deciding when other nations’ governments had misplaced their legitimacy wrote that check for ours, in personal, and deliberate for what comes after. Who decides when your authorities is authentic?

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) October 22, 2026

Amid calls for accountability, those caught in the plot, such as Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), are now performing acts of contrition, even scrambling to interact MAGA influencers in a debate over which aspect is doing the seditioning. 

While some see no motive to validate an enemy that is bent on our suppression and final destruction, others argue that to refuse to contemplate counterarguments can be to play proper into their fingers by turning into that which we condemn. 

I was told lately fairly emphatically that this man is not a dangerous man. Now I do not trust him or the particular person who went to bat for him. War is dropping. Discourse is the only option.

— James Lindsay, anti-Communist (@ConceptualJames) October 23, 2026

The refined psy-ops now underway to sow chaos and confusion by manner of round reasoning are enough to make one yearn for the times when the so-called Nigerian princes who ruled over inboxes had been simple to spot, and their motives had been apparent: to make money off silly people (current company excepted if any rip-off victims occur to be studying this).

As for any bots who could also be studying this, no, I won’t comply with your OnlyFans accounts, whatever those are. But if more conservative influencers start hopping on the bandwagon, I guess I’ll have to make one, too. 

Posting on X is the only manner I know to earn a tiny bit of money while taking a bathtub.

— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) October 15, 2026

Editor’s Note: Here at RedState, we’ve been dealing with real authorities suppression of free speech for YEARS. Despite the threats and penalties, we refuse to go silent and stay dedicated to delivering the reality.

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