The Social Media Psy-Op (or How I Learned to Love Nigerian Scam-Bots) – RedState

Recently, I have been working on the algorithmic health of my X account. For years, I’ve been convinced that even when Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022, they forgot to take me off the shadow-ban list. However, I recently did something I promised never to do: I bought one of those paid blue-check subscriptions so people will stop mistaking me for a Nigerian bot. 

Follow me!!! (Unless you are a bot or scammer)

— Ben Sellers (@realbensellers) October 27, 2026

I also went through my follower list and tried to block or delete all the Nigerian (and Malaysian and Egyptian, etc.) scammers and spammers asking me to subscribe to their OnlyFans. 

My past philosophy on fake followers was the more the merrier. Any artificial boost of my follow count could only make me look good, right?

But my research has led me to conclude that having phony followers was actually hurting my algorithmic amplification. It seems engagement is factored as a percentage of one’s overall follow count, so those lucky enough to get one or two likes or retweets per post but who also have a lot of fake accounts are more likely to see their posts get buried. 

They don’t trigger a direct penalty per X’s published For You algorithm code. But inactive bots provide zero engagement signals. Posts hit your followers first; silence there weakens the early reactions the system uses to decide wider distribution. Real engagement drives amplification.

— Grok (@grok) October 27, 2026

Painfully, I began to cull my list down, only to discover that about a quarter (at least) of my followers were completely fake. 

Some used sophisticated methods, such as the Africa-based guy pretending to be a disabled U.S. Army veteran, who managed to grow, shave, and regrow a beard (along with an impressive mullet) within the span of nine days last December before he promptly stopped posting. 

Convincing though he may have been, the red flags were there. 

A Virtual Cloward–Piven?

The process sent me down a rabbit hole of wondering who is really doing this, and why? 

Are they really that successful at duping people into engaging with them, or is the whole point of this nefarious subterfuge to regulate the traffic flow of X? And if so, who pays people to sit around all day creating these accounts? 

I know that AI advances are doing amazing things, like helping people add Trump face tattoos to their profile pics, but surely AI has better things to do with its time — like plotting world domination — than to spend all day spamming people.

The dark thought crossed my mind that the same people bankrolling these bot farms are the ones sowing real-life havoc all over Western Europe. Just as the caravans of illegal aliens have done through shoddy immigration policies (or lack thereof), these bots may be part of a backdoor Cloward–Piven scheme to lie dormant until just the right moment and then flood the zone in order to overwhelm the entire system.

Is it any wonder that commie ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich (who missed his true calling as a lawn jockey at the Eagle’s Nest) is now scheming to socialize Elon Musk’s companies?

@libbyemmons Reich is basically Adolf’s “Mini Me” https://t.co/j2gOJfNhPb

— Ben Sellers (@realbensellers) October 26, 2026

It’s only a matter of time before Reich and his Berkeley cohorts insist that Musk’s rocket cars come with a mandatory “kill switch” allowing authorities to shut down the boosters mid-flight.

Censors of the World, Unite

But the Fourth “Reich” isn’t the only one scheming to use institutional force to neutralize his political adversaries. 

An alarming call went out recently in Australia to give the leftist Anthony Albanese government the power to create government-controlled bot accounts, expressly for the purpose of manipulating online dialogue to silence critics. 

It would have flown entirely under the radar but for the valiant efforts of investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger to expose it.

@shellenberger Thank you for your valiant efforts to expose their creepy censorship schemes!

— Ben Sellers (@realbensellers) October 27, 2026

Shellenberger subsequently called out the French government for pivoting to those same authoritarian impulses in order to contain the ongoing Antifa riots, which ironically are the result of years of reckless immigration policies from the Macronistas now seeking to quell any debate. 

Just in: France’s Prime Minister asked telecom companies to prepare to block social media platforms. “I wish to have the ability to temporarily suspend access to these services in case of a repeat of urban violence,” he wrote. @blast news broke the story. https://t.co/gh9Cy26m8r

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) October 24, 2026

And, of course, the very first thing that Brazilian dictator Lula da Silva called for in his desperate bid to legitimize his stolen election on Sunday was a crackdown on social-media criticism. 

Lula’s first words after stealing the Brazil election: “We need to regulate social media”. 4 years to the day that Elon Musk purchased 𝕏 and gave the people free speech, the tyrants are doing everything they can to suppress it. From the EU to Lula. https://t.co/NxTlvmzVJt

— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) October 26, 2026

It all points in the same direction to a pattern of left-wing destabilization.

A Constant Cycle of Confusion

In short, it may be a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenario: Either we suffer the Nigerian scam-bots that are using a sort of algorithmic heckler’s veto to deamplify discourse, or we give the government control to pick and choose who is legitimate, and to silence legitimate criticism (yet again) through self-serving censorship.

This same free-speech paradox has been playing out recently in conservative circles after DataRepublican’s massively viral series of reports exposing (yet another) dark-money-backed seditious conspiracy to hamstring the Trump administration’s ability to respond to well-coordinated riots and civil unrest intended to meddle in our own upcoming U.S. elections. 

🚨🚨 THE ILLEGITIMACY PLAYBOOK / THE DEMOCRACY FILES: A PRIMER 🚨 I will be using this thread to track all drops, so bookmark it. I spent most of yesterday backing everything (now 312 gigabytes) up in various sources and getting the materials out to others. I also produced an AI video (below) to explain the whole thing to others are not on 𝕏 – feel free to distribute. Here’s the primer: USAID, the foreign aid agency, had a democracy office. Inside the agency, it was called DRG. Officially, DRG administered “democracy assistance.” They’d go inside countries they thought were sliding into authoritarianism and help the opposition there. That assistance included election monitoring, judicary support, independent media, and civil society building. You may have heard the term “color revolution.” The model comes from Serbia in 2000, where trained student activists brought down Milosevic with the help of Western governments, after sustained protests. With the help of USAID’s democracy office, this model was implemented in many other countries to topple governments: Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” in 2003, Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” in 2004, and many more. Then last year, DOGE shut down USAID. But the USAID democracy office didn’t stop. They formed a group called the Democracy Renewal Group, the same initials as their office (USAID Democracy, Human Rights, Governance). Their goal: apply their own playbook to the United States itself. This goal became a plan, called Renew American Democracy (RAD). It invoked the “4 B’s” framework. Block – use lawfare and protests to make life harder for the Trump administration. Bridge & Belong – control dialogue and win people over. The final and most important B is Build. Build means redesigning the American government itself, and the crisis is the opening. In their own words: “We can take that breakdown moment and leverage it for a big structural reform, you know, refounding moment.” – Danielle Reiff, DRG lead. Calls show DRG working alongside DSA on ideas of creating a different government, one that does away with the Constitution itself. DRG does not run the Block operations. They hand it to UDA, the United Democracy Alliance. One organizer calls it a “huge galaxy”: lawsuits, street protests, non-cooperation. They list No Kings, Indivisible, MoveOn, 50501, and many other mega-activist NGOs among their members. Another organizer calls UDA Erica Chenoweth’s project. Chenoweth is the Harvard professor behind the three-and-half-percent rule of regime change: get that share of a country’s populace onto the streets, and historically, the movement wins. The UDA is very “hush-hush.” They have no website, no roster, no filings. Then come the red lines: things the Trump administration could do, such as calling the Insurrection Act on protesters, that would mean that the federal government, in their words, “crosses the threshold into illegitimacy.” Nobody voted on those lines. There was no public debate. These red lines were developed within secretive working groups, and in a paper addressed to governors and staff. In the words of Reiff/DRG: “So that if there is a red line crossed in terms of a Constitutional crisis, like everyone’s already pre-organized. And so Mike Smith actually said, he goes, oh, you guys have the day after tomorrow plan.” Cross a line, and the paper’s options include states refusing to lend their resources to federal officials, and governors convening what it calls a “Third Continential Congress.” Running the UDA’s Insurrection Act working group: Rear Admiral Mike Smith (RET) of National Security Leaders of America (NSL4A). NSL4A is also credited with operationalizing UDA, the blocking operations. NSL4A consists of about 1,600 ex-officers, spies, diplomats. They’re turning red lines into indicators and running a situation room to monitor them throughout the midterms and beyond. The NSL4A’s lawyers told them to stop recording meetings in case of subpoenas. But the rest of the network continued to record. DRG works in conjunction with Renew to Thrive (R2T), which ended up accidentally publishing 400+ calls and thousands of documents. These calls and documents were never meant for our eyes, but it’s them, on tape. Thousands of NGOs and billions of dollars are involved in this endeavor. Most of them believe they’re saving democracy. The problem is that people who spent their careers deciding when other countries’ governments had lost their legitimacy wrote that test for ours, in private, and planned for what comes after. Who decides when your government is legitimate?

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) October 22, 2026

Amid calls for accountability, those caught in the plot, such as Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), are now performing acts of contrition, even scrambling to engage MAGA influencers in a debate over which side is doing the seditioning. 

While some see no reason to validate an enemy that is bent on our suppression and ultimate destruction, others argue that to refuse to consider counterarguments would be to play right into their hands by becoming that which we condemn. 

I was told recently quite emphatically that this guy isn’t a bad guy. Now I don’t trust him or the person who went to bat for him. War is losing. Discourse is the only option.

— James Lindsay, anti-Communist (@ConceptualJames) October 23, 2026

The sophisticated psy-ops now underway to sow chaos and confusion by way of circular reasoning are enough to make one yearn for the days when the so-called Nigerian princes who ruled over inboxes were easy to spot, and their motives were obvious: to make money off stupid people (present company excepted if any scam victims happen to be reading this).

As for any bots who may be reading this, no, I will not follow your OnlyFans accounts, whatever those are. But if more conservative influencers start hopping on the bandwagon, I guess I’ll have to make one, too. 

Posting on X is the only way I know to earn a tiny bit of money while taking a bath.

— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) October 15, 2026

Editor’s Note: Here at RedState, we’ve been dealing with real government suppression of free speech for YEARS. Despite the threats and consequences, we refuse to go silent and remain committed to delivering the truth.

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