Weaponized Professional Troll @KassandraSeven: Part I

Scale and statistics of a social media attack

Purpose

This is a multipart series about professional Twitter agitator @KassandraSeven. This account is inauthentic in multiple ways, and it is important to show how these kinds of deceptive accounts are seeded, constructed and weaponized to infiltrate movements, agitate followers and slow the momentum of their targets.

Over the following parts, I will explain how this account coordinates and links up with others and the psychological tactics and strategies they employ when engaging their opposition. There will be a detailed and specific list of lies and accusations from this account that I will fact check.

I will show how @KassandraSeven and its allies have weaponized Twitter’s reporting system, how they continue creating alt accounts to avoid suspension for ban evasion, and I will trace back the account’s contentious history to its origin. And I will show how the account uses numerous forms of mis-, dis-, and mal-information to meet its objectives, which we will explore in detail.

Full disclosure: This account has participated in two separate multi-month attacks on me, my friends, partners and businesses. The first attack resulted in the destruction of my volunteer group last year. The second attack is ongoing and directly resulted in my third inauthentic ban from Twitter.

It is important that this account and others like it be critically assessed by Twitter Safety for the harm they do on to the platform, including their continued and unrelenting attempts to agitate individuals, organizations, events and social groups. Coordinated harmful activity is against Twitter’s Terms of Service but I see no evidence of any enforcement, or even a way to report it.

PART I: Scale and Statistics

For our purposes, let’s look at the last month of @KassandraSeven’s Twitter account. Here are the general statistics:

Source - Twitonomy

A few highlights from above:

103 tweets per day is high but considering the amount of time they spend on the platform this is about right for a well-practiced human.

68% of the tweets are replies. This is a high number and is indicative of an account who tries to influence others and argues frequently.

Each of the highlighted accounts below has been actively and persistently participating in the harmful trolling campaign against me and my friends.

The most telling statistic is 6,123 mentions. On average @KassandraSeven tags in almost 2 other accounts in every tweet. This is how it influences other accounts — those it wants to befriend or infiltrate, those it wants to deceive, and those it wants to attack and traumatize.

The yellow highlights are trolls, the green highlights are me, my podcast and my cohost, and the blue is Twitter and Twitter Safety.

Note that in one month — while I was suspended and behind a year-long block of the @KassandraSeven account — it tagged me 339 times, Twitter/Twitter Safety more than 200 times, and it tagged my podcast and co-host over 250 times. These are violations of Twitter Terms of Service.

As we will see, the vast majority of its 3,197 tweets are designed to disparage me personally — and this is just the last 30 days while I was suspended. The total number of times @KassandraSeven has tweeted about me behind a block in the last year is many thousands.

Weaponizing Mentions

In the example below, “octopus” is either a sock puppet of KassandraSeven or a co-conspirator who expresses “concern” in order for this disinformation about me to be shared publicly over and over.

This is a manufactured narrative about my suspension by a harmful troll — @janbobrowicz — who has been devoted to defaming me for 15 months. @KassandraSeven helpfully offers to share his disinfo with its ”new friend.” This is all theater.

The performance is not for themselves of course — it’s for people who know me who get pulled into this drama (redacted below), and for Twitter and Twitter Safety to pile up as many inauthentic complaints about me as possible — “abuse strikes.” That’s why Twitter is so frequently tagged into the account’s tweets.

This is purely artificial and designed to cause maximum damage.

The person behind the @KassandraSeven account is extremely dedicated to their work and tweets fairly equally across 16 hours of the day, seven days a week. Note that every single tweet from @KassandraSeven comes from “Twitter for iPhone” which we will come back to.

The scale of this account’s coordinated harmful behavior is remarkable, both in terms of the length of time it has been operating overall — nearly six years — and the volume and intensity of its attacks.

Part II: Strategies and Tactics

Part III: Psychological Warfare Objectives

UPDATE: After I published this article @KassandraSeven deleted well over 4,000 tweets, most of which were coordinated harassment of me and my friends.