Astroturfing in the Lone Star State
There's a saying that everything is bigger in Texas, but some organizations need to buy followers and retweets to live up to it
Over the last two years, an X account by the name of @DallasJusticeN1 has benefitted from inauthentic amplification provided by spam-for-hire networks on more than one occasion. This account is affiliated with a right wing organization known as Dallas Justice Now that has been reported on in some detail by Steven Monacelli of the Texas Observer. The inauthentic amplification experienced by this account includes both infusions of fake followers and reposts from groups of inauthentic accounts.
In late March and early April 2023, two Dallas-related X accounts, @DallasJusticeN1 (permanent ID 1316908690859986944) and the now-deleted @MyDallasExpress (permanent ID 1348707961603055617) were each followed by thousands of recently created empty accounts in a short span of time. The @DallasJusticeN1 account belongs to the aforementioned Dallas Justice Now group; the @MyDallasExpress account was affiliated with right wing “pink slime” news site Dallas Express. The @DallasJusticeN1 account gained over 30,000 inauthentic followers as a result, while @MyDallasExpress gained roughly 2,000.
The fake followers gained by both accounts came from the same massive network of fake X accounts, consisting of (at least) 1,857,695 accounts with zero posts and zero likes created between November 2022 and March 2023. (Some, but not all, of these fake followers have been suspended in the 18 months since the data was originally gathered and analyzed.) These spam accounts mostly follow cryptocurrency and NFT-themed accounts; the Dallas accounts are a bit of a departure from their usual clientele.
Among the accounts followed by the network was a curious account by the name of @PoloxioShop, which was affiliated with a similarly-named website and Instagram page. Back in April 2023, this website sold followers for a variety of social media platforms, including Twitter/X, and is presumably where Dallas Justice Now and the Dallas Express picked up their inauthentic followers. In the time since, the @PoloxioShop X account has been suspended, and the option to purchase X followers has been removed from the Poloxio Shop website, although the site continues to offer followers for other platforms.
As one might expect from an account whose followers are mostly inactive fake accounts, @DallasJusticeN1’s X posts generally don’t get much engagement. There are some interesting exceptions, however, including an October 15th post that received over 200 reposts but only 31 likes (as of October 18th, 2024). Despite the fact that the Dallas Justice Now account posts almost exclusively in English, almost all of the reposts are from Japanese-language accounts. A few earlier Dallas Justice Now posts show similar patterns of engagement, but unfortunately the list of accounts that reposted the older posts is unavailable, rendering those incidents difficult to diagnose.
Due to the removal of the free X/Twitter API, it is no longer possible to map out the network that amplified the recent Dallas Justice Now post as extensively as was done with the Poloxio Shop fake follower network. The repost network consists of at least 209 accounts created between November 2021 and May 2024, the majority during the last two months of that timespan. These accounts mostly amplify a mix of Japanese and English-language cryptocurrency and gaming-related content.
These spam accounts also periodically amplify the X account @MySocialFollow, which claims to offer “World Class Social Media Promotion”. The link on its profile leads to a website called “My Social Following”, which (much like Poloxio Shop), offers a variety of illicit services for growing accounts and amplifying content on sundry social media platforms. These services include the ability to purchase “Twitter X Retweets”, which is presumably where the bogus amplification on the Dallas Justice Now post came from.
