Do you want to be a news source? Just change your account name
A "news" account is much more believable when it has a bunch of followers and an older creation date, after all
Bogus “news” accounts are a dime a dozen on social media platforms such as X/Twitter. Often, the people who run these accounts elect to rename and redecorate an existing account rather than creating a new one. Newly-created accounts are often viewed with suspicion, while an account that has been around for a few months or years is more likely to be accepted as legitimate at first glance, especially if it has a large number of followers. Sometimes accounts of this sort function as general news aggregators (often plagiarizing material from actual journalists), while others focus on a specific topic or event. This article covers a few examples of renamed “news” accounts that have popped up on X/Twitter over the last few years.
In late 2021, a Twitter account by the name of @TrackerTrial rapidly accumulated hundreds of thousands of followers by claiming to cover the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, which the operator of the account claimed “all major media outlets” were “silent” on. In reality, major media outlets published a variety of stories on the trial, and the @TrackerTrial account’s “coverage” of the trial was largely plagiarized from the social media feeds of journalists who were actually present in the courtroom.
The @TrackerTrial account was created a year prior to the Maxwell trial with a different name and a different profile image. The account was originally named @hermanhugh69 and sported a stolen profile photo. It then changed its handle to @WSBMonitor and posted about the stock market for several weeks before finally deleting all of its content and changing its handle once again, this time to @TrackerTrial. (We can tell all of these are the same account because they all have the same permanent ID, 1327007938821709826.) The account was permanently suspended by Twitter on December 8th, 2021, which prompted a rather startling degree of outrage for the removal of an inauthentic social account.
On February 27th, 2023, a blue-check Twitter “news” account by the name of @ThePatriotOasis posted a deepfake video of Joe Biden allegedly calling for a national military draft. The fact that no such thing happened (and the fact that the original creators of the video acknowledged that it was an AI-modified fake) did not prevent @ThePatriotOasis’s post from going viral. This bogus news account, which has periodically received massive infusions of fake followers from a large fake follower botnet, is still active on X/Twitter as of the time of this writing.
The account presently named @ThePatriotOasis (permanent ID 1392538357251469312) has gone through multiple makeovers. It appears to have originally been named @CodyGrantham12 back in May 2021, and to have been renamed to @TheTennesseeGuy at some point prior to June 2022, before eventually changing its handle to @ThePatriotOasis and reinventing itself as a right-wing news account.
Although @ThePatriotOasis claims to be a news account in its profile, there is no indication that the account has done any actual reporting. Almost all of the account’s “news” content (including the deepfake Biden video) is simply reposts of videos from prominent conservative accounts. Intermingled with the reposted videos are various forms of follower growth spam, a mix of “MAGA Accounts less than <X> followers drop your handle below” and “Do you agree with <insert random engagement bait question>? If so, I want to follow you” posts.
In April 2023, a blue-check X/Twitter “Breaking News” account with the handle @TheHeraldPostUS rapidly gained over 75,000 fake followers from a fake engagement botnet. This account, which is presently still online, was created back in October 2021 and appears to have originally been a Spanish-language account by the name of @BKDLATAM. As with the other accounts discussed in this article, further name changes can be tracked via the account’s permanent ID, 1448483707933843460. (At present, https://tweeterid.com allows you to look up an account name by permanent ID and vice versa, although there’s no guarantee that this state of affairs will last.)
These three examples are far from the only cases of X/Twitter accounts being renamed, purged of content, and repurposed as “news” accounts. Fake war correspondent accounts providing bogus or plagiarized coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine have been a recurring phenomenon, and many of these accounts are old accounts that have been renamed and redecorated as journalists. Fake journalists pretending to work for major newspapers and posting pro-Chinese government propaganda have repeatedly turned up amongst the customers of follower sales site RealActiveFollowers.com (associated with the “Round Year Fun” family of X/Twitter malware apps); these “journalist” accounts have, thus far, all been renamed accounts. The existence of this tactic for creating bogus “news” accounts is worth keeping in mind as you scroll (especially on platforms that sell verification checkmarks).
I think in some of these cases (maybe many?) the previous accounts were hacked, then sold to people on the black market..
I’d be curious if you can dig up some stuff about that whole scheme.