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Was I targeted/cloned by Musk’s associates after I left X? Cataloguing several unusual events
In case you haven’t noticed I’ve been retired from X for quite some time. The platform just isn’t worth contributing to, the content is stale and repetitive (a few notable/suppressed exceptions aside), and as the election approaches I can only imagine how much more abysmal it’s going to get.
What I and several others before me have long warned about (in painstaking detail) has come to pass with untold ferocity. Ignore actionable intelligence analysis at your peril - today entire cities lie in ruin the world over, and the foreign threats to American hegemony/national security have plunged us into a crisis the likes of which this generation has never seen.
This being the case, you can imagine my surprise when a number of my more astute colleagues in the OSINT community informed me that a rather unsavory engagement-farming MAGA influencer was now running his own brand new version of “The Postman” - and had apparently even used the likeness of my profile picture.
(It’s worth noting the ironic vacuity of appropriating the 1997 film The Postman - a film portraying the undying belief in American ideals, egalitarianism, women’s rights, and the nuances of patriotic duty for the purposes of promoting the currently treacherous GOP, but here I digress.)
Unexpectedly, once I started quote-tweeting this account in disagreement I was almost immediately suspended for impersonation without warning.
While such occurences are so commonplace on X as to be daily routine for some, given the nature of my research (and a few of my more interesting associations) I’m certainly not in the habit of leaving stones unturned, and I felt compelled to uncover what had happened to the best of my abilities.
Even though I hadn’t been posting for months, I was contented that after an elaborating exchange with X’s customer service (alongside the supportive efforts of my colleagues), I was able to restore my account/research - at least for now. Yet I must say, what I found investigating the matter itself was very unsettling indeed.
For your open consideration, I submit the following:
To begin, the user who now calls himself “@officalpostman” appears to be “@Mr_Flipper81”. Among other things, this user looks to be have been unusually involved with fintwit/meme-stock pump speculation and so on, that great contemporary American pastime.
Here’s an old Reddit thread verifying this prior handle so you can see for yourself. I’ve made a video of this for further confirmation.
Here are several more tweets which display the user’s original handle in addition. There are countless other ways to verify this on a more technical level, but this will surely suffice here.
Now to be sure this already is fairly peculiar, but once I looked into the primary associations here I quickly did a double take. “@Mr_Flipper81” seems to be constantly amplifying the influencer “@Tarabull808”, continually retweeting her (often almost exclusively, and sometimes for days - see the video below)
“@TaraBull808” looks to be quite the devoted fan of “@Mr_Flipper81” as well. In fact the possibility has even crossed my mind that these accounts might be run by the same person, although for the purposes of being thorough, that is not implied at this time.
At any rate, who really are these bizarre people? While there are a number of interesting things to be said about “@TaraBull808”, the most unusual is the fact that she’s one of the very select few accounts regularly in contact with Elon Musk himself - a man I’ve been particularly critical of, and who I believe there are reasonable grounds to suspect of criminal behavior at an immense scale.
It’s hard not to wonder - given my prior extensive research on malign operations directed towards the United States, why was my account evidently imitated (and to the best of my discernment, subsequently flagged/banned) by a network with such truly remarkable associations?
It’s additionally noteworthy that X hasn’t banned this new account despite many of us reporting it - although given my suspicions here this would appear rather unsurprising. But whatever the case may be, supposing there was an effort to paper me over in some fashion, might that suggest something about the veracity of my work?
Naturally I have my hunches, but I’ll leave it to my readers to make up their own minds. The site is quickly turning into a depraved ghost-town anyways and I wasn’t planning on returning, but as a rather harmonious conclusion to all this it would appear that for now X finally has The Postman it deserves.