The curious case of Mayson Burch

In which posts from an obvious fake account go viral yet again

this person does not exist, but 21K people don’t seem to have noticed

Meet “Mayson Burch”, a pro-Trump X account with the handle @anticatlady, a StyleGAN-generated face, and over 21,000 followers as of August 1st, 2024. This account, which has authored viral political posts with some regularity, was created back in January 2012, yet curiously has no visible posts prior to June 2023. The account doesn’t get any less suspect when examined more closely; in addition to the artificially generated face and eleven year gap in activity, the account has been renamed, redecorated, and purged of content on at least one occasion. Additionally, Google and DuckDuckGo searches turn up evidence that the account was used to promote dodgy cryptocurrency projects under a previous handle.

until July 25th, the account had a blue checkmark and the handle @MaysonBurch

The “Mayson Burch” account has sported a paid blue verification checkmark for much of its recent history, including various posts captured on archive sites. The verification checkmark is absent from posts made after July 25th, 2024, although it is unclear whether this is the result of a cancelled subscription, a recent handle change from @MaysonBurch to @anticatlady, or moderation actions taken against the account. Searching with the “filter:blue_verified” option confirms that the account was still verified at the time of its July 25th posts.

some examples of the “Mayson Burch” account’s more popular posts

The “Mayson Burch” account primarily posts right-wing political content, and has been doing so on a regular basis since June 2023, prior to when the account has no visible posts. (We’ll come back to this aspect in a bit.) Many of the recent posts are related to the upcoming U.S. presidential election, and either express support for Republican candidate Donald Trump or opposition to Democratic candidate/current Vice President Kamala Harris and (prior to his departure from the race) President Joe Biden. The account’s posts have gone viral occasionally, with a post about the assassination attempt on Trump racking up over a thousand reposts, and a joke about the Baltimore bridge collapse receiving almost a million views.

to nobody’s surprise, this account has been repeatedly renamed

As it turns out, the Mayson Burch account has been renamed, with the handle having been changed at least twice, and the display name at least once. The account, which has the permanent ID 457280183 and was created back in January 2012, appears to have started out with the handle @sergeyuf and the display name “Sergey” or “Sergey Mil”, and still had this name as recently as June 2022, when it appeared in a sample of followers of Joe Rogan’s official X account (@joerogan). At some point no later than June 2023, the handle was changed to @MaysonBurch, and the display name to “Mayson Burch”; this makeover was accompanied by a purge of older posts. The handle was changed again in late July 2024, to @anticatlady; the display name, at least presently, remains “Mayson Burch”.

back when “Mayson Burch” was “Sergey Mil”, the account had an affinity for the musical “The Book of Mormon”

Wayback Machine archives for the @sergeyuf era of the account are somewhat sparse, but include reposts of content related to Florida sports, right wing politics, and the musical “The Book of Mormon”. The Wayback Machine archives stop partway through 2017, but web searches for the account name turn up old Google Drive spreadsheets indicating that it was used for various cryptocurrency promotion schemes beginning in 2018. It is unclear how many ownership changes the account has gone through, but one plausible hypothesis is that the original owner lost the account to cryptocurrency scammers in 2017 or 2018, who in turn gave or sold it to whomever is currently using it to pose as “Mayson Burch”. (It’s also possible, of course, that the same person retained control of the account and purged and repurposed it repeatedly.)

I am not going to include a live link to an unfamiliar Google Drive in this article, but for those who are interested, the URL is: https: // docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17VrwXPGx_laLk81OV6p-565Ai3kO06QswmiZAIt4DRs/edit?gid=446694995#gid=446694995