Weaponized Professional Troll @KassandraSeven: Part II

Tactics and Strategy

Part II: Tactics and Strategy

NOTE: after Part I of this series @KassandraSeven deactivated itself. The series will continue regardless.

UPDATE: @KassandraSeven has reactivated but continues to protect its tweets.

Strategy

@KassandraSeven’s strategy was to build its follower count and infiltrate the left, gain influence and allies, and then deploy and coordinate a set of harmful trolls playing different roles to present itself as both credible and authentic. The goal of the account is to influence people, and to change people’s minds, by deceiving and defrauding them. This is not fundamentally different from deceptive accounts like “Q.”‘

@KassandraSeven is a sophisticated account with at least six years of practice creating deceptive content on social media. It appears this account was set up to falsely present itself as a “Resister” starting in 2016.

It used a series of inorganic tactics to create followers for itself using whatever hashtags, images, music and political issues that seemed to be most effective at drawing attention to itself.

After the 2016 election, @KassandraSeven focused exclusively on Twitter where it engaged with as many “Resistance” accounts as it could and participated in “Follow Back Resistance” which inauthentically boosted its follower count.

It went through a number of “phases” alternating between 1) falsely promoting its “Resistance” agenda to gain followers and 2) targeting people — while occasionally going dormant, the timing of which will become relevant.

In summary, the strategy behind @KassandraSeven is to infiltrate, cause chaos and eliminate targets.

Tactics

@KassandraSeven has initiated or participated in numerous types of attacks. Here’s a basic overview of how “ops” work on social media to harm people.

It’s time to talk about harmful online “ops”

Anonymity / LARP

Anonymity is crucial to this account meeting its objectives. Were people to know the identity of the person running it, they could have authentic context for what the account says.

But @KassandraSeven is an invented persona. It is a harmful LARP (live action role play character) that has presented a completely artificial portrait of itself for the purpose of targeting people under false pretenses.

What are LARPs?

Good Cop

@KassandraSeven’s entire timeline is about generating sympathetic, positive influence for itself in order wield that influence to target people. This is done in several ways.

Positive Twitter Feedback

The account uses likes, retweets and replies to authentic accounts in order to influence them. While this is certainly not unusual on Twitter, what is different about this kind of account is that its persona is false. The influence it generates for itself is inauthentic.

Sympathy

@KassandraSeven constantly generates sympathy for itself by referring to itself being under attack — which is pure projection.

It weaponizes misogyny to influence women to its side.

And it weaponizes its “family” in order to create a false sense of vulnerability. Remember, nothing about this account is what it seems.

DMs and infiltration

This account not only influences people in public, it targets people through DMs as well. The goal is to befriend the target and “agree” with them on as many topics as possible while sharing credible but superfluous information. After the relationship has been established, @KassandraSeven starts to include negative information about other targets in conversations as well.

Over time, the target that has been “befriended” may participate in attacks on other targets in sympathy. This is the goal. To recruit people into harmful coordinated activity through undue influence.

Bad Cop

The undue influence @KassandraSeven gains through its “good cop” persona gives it the desired impact when it switches to attack mode.

Weaponizing Twitter Reporting

This account cooperates with a large number of accounts to mass-report people off Twitter.

The second time I was inauthentically banned from Twitter, I had responded to Mike Flynn’s ally Tony Shaffer who had libeled me as a “felon” and a “sexual predator.”

“Resister” @KassandraSeven used the opportunity to report me for tweets — responding to Mike Flynn’s friend, fascist insurrectionist Tony Shaffer — that Twitter later said did not break any rules. This is an extremely good example of the real agenda of this account which is to target individual accounts lower their influence and/or remove their voices entirely.

Here is @KassandraSeven over two weeks after I was banned from Twitter because of its false reporting requesting and receiving an archive of my tweets in order to continue to harass me.

Note that she says “tweeting about someone who does not have a twitter account is not ‘targeted harassment’” which is both false and immoral. Harassing someone in any forum is against the law. Harassing someone on Twitter regardless of their account status is against Twitter’s Terms of Service.

Coordination

@KassandraSeven cooperates with a number of accounts with high technical expertise in its project to disparage and attack targets.

@conspirator0 is an account with an extraordinary breadth of data analysis tools and skills. Unfortunately, it spends a lot of its time cooperating with others who mass report people and get them “abuse strikes” so they will be suspended.

Just in the last few days both @KassandraSeven and @conspirator0 have taken aim at my friends at Meidas Touch. This has been an ongoing effort to de-platform and discredit them and @PatriotTakes who do great work in the effort to preserve American democracy.

Why, of all the accounts on Twitter, would they attack these accounts which are run by people who are working to inform American citizens?

Note that @KassandraSeven deleted its defamatory tweets before it deactivated its account.

Also note that Cody Webb — who is very technical, and has been participating in the attack on me, my friends and projects for a year and half — is piling on. This is the same network that had me inauthentically suspended three times.

This weaponization of reporting not only affects the people who have been inauthentically suspended, it affects others by frightening them into being silent. I have had at least a dozen followers that had the temerity to politely defend me, have their accounts be permanently suspended for absolute nonsense.

There are technical tools being used to accomplish these objectives, which we will examine in detail in future articles.

Grifting

@KassandraSeven and its allies constantly accuse others of “grifting,” yet this account “sold” items through Threadless for many years that were literally nothing.

“She is using her Voice and Art to increase social awareness and political participation.”

Here are some of the items that @KassandraSeven was “selling.”

While people have the right to sell anything they want, I am extremely skeptical about whether people were authentically buying any of @KassandraSeven’s “products.”

Often, these kind of storefronts are simply a way for people to get paid by malicious actors.

Conclusion

While it’s impossible to guess exactly why “KassandraSeven” deactivated after a bit of scrutiny, what will become clear is that the account has a lot to hide.

Part III: Psychological Warfare Objectives