fka u/the_itsb, aka the_itsb@beehaw.org, the_itsb@midwest.social, the_itsb@lemmy.world, the_itsb@sh.itjust.works 41f artsy ADHD married to 42m machine whisperer, teen son trans & also ADHD. We do outdoor equipment & small engine repair at our home just outside Athens, OH.
It's wild to me that there are actual adults who think "diversity, equity, and inclusion" is somehow evil and bad. I grew up in a conservative family in a rural area, and even I remember being told by my parents and Sunday school teachers that "It takes all kinds," and "Jesus loves them, you should too." Those lessons convey the same ethos as "diversity, equity, and inclusion."
PushShift was a sorta reddit archive that could be used to see deleted comments and threads - if anyone ever sent you to a ceddit, rareddit, unddit, reveddit, etc link to view a deleted post or comment thread, that information was gathered via PushShift.
Spoiler to save you a click - it's the DNC. 🙄
I was hoping it would be a HobbyDrama writeup, but this blew me away, this feels like a gold standard post that I can't believe I've never seen before. What a talented, skillful writer! The detail, the flow, everything is just right - just the perfect amount of background, just the perfect amount of depth. Thank you so much for this link!
Article text:
In eight months, Erica Marsh has become one of the most consistently viral left-wing voices on Twitter, gaining more than 130,000 followers for her hyper-liberal, often melodramatic opinions on the biggest flash points in American news.
She’s been especially popular with conservatives, who promoted her as a perfect symbol of how overly theatrical and inane liberals can be — like when she attacked the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision last week by saying “no Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system.” The tweet was viewed more than 27 million times.
There’s just one problem: She’s probably a fake.
The “proud Democrat” in Washington, as she described herself on Twitter, doesn’t show up in any local phone or voting records. The Biden presidential campaign, where she said she worked as a field organizer, has no record of her; neither does the Obama Foundation, where she claimed to have volunteered.
Her only other known social media profile, on TikTok, posts copies of her tweets but has never included her speaking or showing her face. And a digital-imaging expert said that the three purported selfies she’s posted on Twitter — showing a young, smiling blond woman — bear the hallmarks of digital manipulation.
“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.”
After The Washington Post raised questions about the account with employees of Twitter’s trust and safety department, the account was suspended on Sunday for unknown reasons. Twitter does not officially respond to requests for comment. Marsh’s account, which did not respond to requests for comment, has not tweeted since.
Months after Elon Musk took over Twitter with a scorched-earth playbook to eradicate scammers and spam, the internet’s long-established playbook for winning online engagement — known as “attention farming” — remains decisively in play. Marsh’s account tended to post messages so polarizing and incendiary that readers couldn’t help but respond, boosting her public profile in the process — a tactic known as “rage baiting.”
The strategy was most infamously deployed by trolls linked to the Russian government to stir up angst and chaos during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. But it is also a common tool for domestic tricksters and opportunists seeking to ridicule their political opponents — or just benefit from the attention of a big, engaged follower base.
Her account carried a blue “verified” check mark — an icon that once connoted that the person’s identity had been confirmed by Twitter but, since Elon Musk’s takeover last year, has come to mean only that the account had paid for the designation.
She waved off doubters by saying repeatedly that she was not a “parody,” “fake person or a robot,” but tweeted once that she wished she were, because “it would make navigating Twitter a lot easier.”
She declined to share details about herself by saying she had a “terrifying” stalker from social media, adding, “I’ve learned from mistakes in the past and choose not to share much of my personal life.” Last week, as people questioned her legitimacy, she asked her Twitter followers to recommend a defamation attorney to her.
When it came to political commentary, she seemed to regard every polarizing news story as an opportunity to offer her opinion and to solicit her fans to promote her to their own networks.
She started her account in September 2022, shortly before Musk’s takeover, with a rapid-fire series of left-leaning tweets and requests for people to retweet if they agreed. It worked: In November and December, she was gaining more than 1,000 followers a day, according to audience data from the social media analytics firm SocialBlade.
It’s unclear where the account’s photos came from. But Scott-Railton suspects they may be stock images, selfies taken from a woman not connected to the account, or images that were otherwise altered, perhaps to combine multiple photos into one. Each had a different background, though the facial features remained largely the same.
Some of her tweets were copied word for word from other big left-wing accounts or trending tweets, while others sometimes read like liberal caricatures; last month, she said she still wears “2 masks whenever I go out and support Ukraine.”
On Twitter, she became a subject of heavy doubt and fascination, with some theorizing that she was “a right-wing agitator or a foreign actor” or that she was “designed to collect as much data about Democratic voters as possible for God knows what.”
Amateur online sleuths noted that her name matched a character on the TV show “One Tree Hill” and said they’d found one of her profile photos on a German marketing website. (That last part could not be confirmed.)
The assertion she was phony, however, became just another way to build an audience. “A MAGA just told me that my PROUD DEMOCRAT followers are bots,” she tweeted last year. “Let’s prove him wrong — where are my allies at?”
Her most extreme and mean-spirited tweets, including her glee over the death of a Jan. 6 rioter, were often used by conservatives to criticize the Biden administration based on her assertion she’d been involved with his campaign.
Her tweet about the affirmative action decision, in which she said Black people would not succeed in a merit-based system, sparked a viral outcry of its own: One tweet, in which a correspondent for a news outlet covering U.S. Africa policy tweeted that a former Biden organizer had offered “the craziest and most disrespectful argument” he had ever read, has been viewed nearly 4 million times.
Marsh later defended her tweet, saying it “had been manipulated for propaganda and misinformation by ULTRA MAGA.” The Today News Africa correspondent, Simon Ateba, defended his tweet in an email to The Post. “There was no reason to doubt the authenticity of her Twitter account until it was suspended on Sunday,” he wrote. “It is natural for us to assume that the information people provide on their profiles is true.”
A former Twitter trust and safety employee who investigated accounts for impersonation and authentication, who left the company earlier this year after Musk’s takeover and spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of harassment, said the company had seen a rush of accounts out of North Macedonia around October 2022 posing as pro-Trump influencers and offering up the same style of “over-the-top, clickbait tweets.”
Troll farms from the republic in Eastern Europe have in recent years run sensationalist websites and taken over Facebook pages in hopes of pulling in ad money from angry readers in the U.S., regardless of their political leanings.
It’s unclear whether Marsh’s account was part of that kind of campaign, the former Twitter employee said, but it shares many of the characteristics of the networks of fake political accounts created during the run-up to the 2022 midterms.
The accounts were often run from foreign countries and opined on divisive current events while posing as politically active Americans. They tended to use profile pictures taken from around the internet to create a persona that seemed relatable or engaging: young women, teachers and veterans. And they used exaggerated political stances to stir up controversy, draw readers’ ire and build an audience — either to score political points or monetize the account, maybe by changing its name and content in the months to come.
For some months, the Erica Marsh account profile included a link to a Venmo account, which would’ve allowed readers to send her money. Venmo didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment.
“You can go a long way with a reasonably consistent, one-dimensional identity online if it has certain features: smart strategies for posting content, an attractive profile picture, a degree of spice and sassiness,” Scott-Railton said. “Our online discourse is deeply vulnerable to this kind of character.”
The subtle touches on this edit make it totally 👌 I honestly couldn't tell you if it's the matching garlic bulb on the safety seal and label, or the matching background bottles, or the gorgeous texture of the pesto rendered at just the right depth under the bottle, but, mmm 🤌 delicious, thank you
Does your stepson have a therapist he trusts? ADHD diagnosis and medication helped with school, but finally getting the right fit with a therapist made such a huge difference with my teen's social life and rapport with me and his dad. I know therapy can be crazy expected, but we found a person through Open Path Collective that does telehealth, and it's much more affordable and convenient.
I hope things get easier between you all and that he realizes how much you care about him and want to help. ❤️ Teens can be so difficult but so fucking cool, it's such a privilege to watch them develop as people.
I legitimately thought I was looking at somebody's homemade loose powder eyeshadow collection until I realized what community this was and that those black and silver things aren't retractable brushes 😂🤦
Where? It still happens where I live in southern Ohio.
I use Textra on Android and I can select which parts of a message to copy. I'm using the paid version and have for years, so I'm not sure whether that's a standard feature or premium. The day Messages stopped letting me color-code each conversation was the day I quit using it; I can't tell you how many times each person being a distinct color has saved my ass from texting the wrong stuff to the wrong person.
You were born for this moment! So happy to have bean here too see it.
(Image description: South Park's Mr Mackey image macro with text: "Cars are bad, Mmmkay")
*thanolds
I did the "too much for people" thing this weekend and just feel awful about it. I met a friend of a friend who I had been told was a little quirky, and we instantly clicked and started chattering in the way that neurodivergent people have, and after a while talking I asked if they were neurodivergent... And that was a terrible mistake, I think I really offended them though they were super nice about it, and I can't stop kicking myself over it. Really cool person with a very interesting job, our dogs got along, lives nearby - I was stoked to have made a new friend, but I think I ruined it by getting way too personal.
Oh well.
I'll try to keep this more positive spin on it in mind. Thank you for helping me see that there could be a silver lining. ❤️
Diagnosed combined type checking in - I also do this. I came to the comments to upvote whoever was here to tell OP that if this is a constant struggle, they might have ADHD.
Sure! Undiagnosed and unaddressed, I struggled my whole life with emotional instability (huge, overwhelming feelings, very reactive), chaos in my head (songs, phrases, conversations, scenarios, etc, all jumbled up on shuffle-repeat while I'm trying to steer a train of thought through), difficulty with relationships (chaotic brain makes conversations tangential & interrupt-y, makes it easy to forget people exist, etc), difficulty starting tasks and finishing projects, and I spent almost 40 years thinking that all of this was the result of various character flaws that someday I would finally be a good enough person to fix:
Someday I won't be reactive and my brain will be quiet if I just meditate enough! (Meditation does help but definitely wasn't enough.)
Someday people will like me better if I learn to be quiet during conversations! (I try, I really do. 😂🤦🤷 I literally make lists for and take notes during big conversations.)
Someday I will be successful and have an always-tidy house! (Routines and lists help but weren't enough.)
Then my 14yo was really struggling in school and with friends and asked to be assessed for ADHD and was diagnosed, so I started reading up on it so I could parent better and in everything I was reading, I recognized myself as much as my kid. All of these problem areas are the result of my brain functioning differently from others', and no amount of pounding their strategies into it is going to make it act like theirs. There are modified and alternate strategies that work better for neurodivergent brains.
Super half-ass early morning analogy - it's like trying to drive a manual transmission vehicle when all you know is an automatic. I spent my entire life thinking that my car would start but just wouldn't go anywhere, but actually I just needed to push the clutch down to get it into gear. 😂 Why didn't anybody tell me I had a clutch?!?! They don't have clutches, they don't know any better. Now that I found my clutch, I can see that my car isn't a jalopy piece of shit, it's just different, and it is totally capable of driving!
Life-changing.
Please feel free to ask anything else! I'm happy to discuss, I want to make sure everybody knows to check their floor for a clutch before they give up on their car.
All these things you're bringing up are very common ADHD symptoms! PTSD and extreme stress and fatigue can cause these things too, but if you're not under particular pressure or recovering from trauma, or if it's been like this as long as you can remember, you might want to look into ADHD.
Getting diagnosed was life-changing for me and has radically reshaped my conception of myself.
Like the subreddits on indefinite blackout, I have no intention of going back until Reddit deals more equitably with mods and third-party app devs, which means I might never go back. That's sad but okay.
My relationship with it has irrevocably changed. It was foolish of me to let myself become dependent on any community administered by capitalists, because their goals and values are going to inherently be different than mine. Once their focus shifts from "make this community popular" to "make this community profitable," our goals are never going to realign, so it's better to start over in a place where simply building community is the goal.
These are both very common ADHD symptoms. Not trying to diagnose you, just putting it out there as something you might want to consider researching further if these things cause you difficulties or problems.
(double posted)
It's one misguided poster spamming the shit out of a bunch of instances, but this post itself seems to imply a more widespread problem.
What are you trying to achieve with this post? Would you like to spark conversation about this particular person's crusade ? Or are you the umpteenth poster this month complaining about content referencing Reddit?
Honestly, the bitching about the bitching about Reddit is becoming pretty fucking tiresome, imho. Why are we talking about this? Why did you make this post? Why not just downvote that asshat's content and move on? It doesn't contribute, you allegedly don't care, why post to complain about complaints?