Trinh/Granger Residence
St. Paul, Maryland
T
ommy Granger continued to work his laptop, digging deeper and deeper into the fake accounts created for the professors, continually shaking his head in awe of how far back the deception went. His custom designed algorithms were already scraping social media, grabbing the profiles of the followers of the fake accounts, and drilling deeper to find out any connections that might lead to who was behind this.
“Unbelievable,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Well, I’m looking at these so-called friends they’ve got. They each have thousands of people that they like, all kinds of groups and pages that they follow and like, and there seems to be all kinds of common threads. When you go through them, there are hundreds that seem to like almost all the same things, and when you put them all together as a whole, there’s no six degrees of separation here, it’s two or three at most.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means these are all fake accounts. We already know the professors’ accounts are fake, but all their friends are fake as well. The pages and groups have so many fake accounts with links to the same posts and whatnot, that it looks like they were created by someone who wasn’t too concerned about anyone diving too deeply into them.”
Mai scrunched her nose. “What does that mean?”
“It means they probably never thought anyone would actually look. It’s all meant for show. These pages and groups look like they have all kinds of support, but the reality is they don’t. It’s all fake.”
“All?”
“Well, mostly. There are legit followers, but they’re probably only doing that because they think what they’re following is legit. If none of those fake accounts were linked, it would look like a one-man-band. Instead, it looks like an orchestra.”
“Who would do that?”
He shrugged. “Well, not the government. It’s not the Russians or Chinese. They’d be more careful, and I don’t think they’d care about these causes enough to try and discredit them. I think this is some private group that’s created this. It’s all kinds of different social causes that they’re all linked to. Quite often, what these groups do is they create fake accounts to make themselves appear more popular than they actually are. More important than they actually are. You don’t have much legitimacy if you only have five followers on a page. Have a thousand or ten thousand, and suddenly you’ve got something that if people stumble upon it, they think, ‘oh, this must be legit because look at how many people like it.’ Last year, Facebook removed over three billion fake accounts in just six months. Can you imagine? This is why social media is so dangerous. Too many people think that what they’re seeing is legit, when so much of it is bullshit created by bad actors or activists.”
Mai cut off his diatribe before it could really get going. “So, what does this mean
?”
“It means that somebody has spent a lot of time creating these profiles, and they’re trying to frame the professors.”
Mai’s eyes narrowed. “But how would they know they’d be there? Didn’t they just get the invitations a week ago? How long have they been setting up these profiles?”
“It looks like they’ve been setting them up for years. But all they need to do is change the profile photo and the name, and away you go.”
“This is
unbelievable. You need to send this information to your friend.”
He pursed his lips, suddenly insecure. “Oh, the people on his team probably already know this.”
Mai leaned over and squeezed his leg. “You’re as good as any of them, if not better. Do you really want to risk them not knowing this right away?”
He flushed at the praise, and the love in her eyes. “You’re right. I’ll send it now.”
