There’s only one downside: She’s in all probability a faux.
The “proud Democrat” in Washington, as she described herself on Twitter, doesn’t present up in any native telephone or voting data. The Biden presidential marketing campaign, the place she mentioned she labored as a subject organizer, has no file of her; neither does the Obama Foundation, the place she claimed to have volunteered.
Her solely different identified social media profile, on TikTok, posts copies of her tweets however has by no means included her talking or exhibiting her face. And a digital-imaging knowledgeable mentioned that the three purported selfies she’s posted on Twitter — exhibiting a younger, smiling blond girl — bear the hallmarks of digital manipulation.
“I strongly suspect that this person doesn’t exist,” mentioned John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher on the Citizen Lab on the University of Toronto who research on-line disinformation. “It’s as if she dropped from the moon and arrived fully formed with this narrative that makes liberals look like idiots.”
After The Washington Post raised questions in regards to the account with workers of Twitter’s belief and security division, the account was suspended on Sunday for unknown causes.
Twitter doesn’t formally reply to requests for remark. Marsh’s account, which didn’t reply to requests for remark, has not tweeted since.
Months after Elon Musk took over Twitter with a scorched-earth playbook to eradicate scammers and spam, the web’s long-established playbook for successful on-line engagement — generally known as “attention farming” — stays decisively in play.
Marsh’s account tended to publish messages so polarizing and incendiary that readers couldn’t assist however reply, boosting her public profile within the course of — a tactic generally known as “rage baiting.”
The technique was most infamously deployed by trolls linked to the Russian authorities to fire up angst and chaos through the 2016 U.S. presidential marketing campaign. But it’s also a typical device for home tricksters and opportunists in search of to ridicule their political opponents — or simply profit from the eye of a giant, engaged follower base.
For months, Marsh’s account had raised suspicions amongst on-line misinformation specialists attributable to her lack of a real-world footprint and her devotion to attention-grabbing viewpoints one referred to as “cartoonishly liberal.”
Her account carried a blue “verified” test mark — an icon that after connoted that the individual’s id had been confirmed by Twitter however, since Elon Musk’s takeover final 12 months, has come to imply solely that the account had paid for the designation.
She waved off doubters by saying repeatedly that she was not a “parody,” “fake person or a robot,” however tweeted as soon as that she wished she had been, as a result of “it would make navigating Twitter a lot easier.”
She declined to share particulars about herself by saying she had a “terrifying” stalker from social media, including, “I’ve learned from mistakes in the past and choose not to share much of my personal life.” Last week, as folks questioned her legitimacy, she requested her Twitter followers to suggest a defamation legal professional to her.
When it got here to political commentary, she appeared to treat each polarizing information story as a possibility to supply her opinion and to solicit her followers to advertise her to their very own networks.
She began her account in September 2022, shortly earlier than Musk’s takeover, with a rapid-fire collection of left-leaning tweets and requests for folks to retweet in the event that they agreed. It labored: In November and December, she was gaining greater than 1,000 followers a day, in keeping with viewers knowledge from the social media analytics agency SocialBlade.
It’s unclear the place the account’s photographs got here from. But Scott-Railton suspects they could be inventory pictures, selfies taken from a girl not linked to the account, or pictures that had been in any other case altered, maybe to mix a number of photographs into one. Each had a special background, although the facial options remained largely the identical.
Some of her tweets had been copied phrase for phrase from different huge left-wing accounts or trending tweets, whereas others generally learn like liberal caricatures; final month, she mentioned she nonetheless wears “2 masks whenever I go out and support Ukraine.”
On Twitter, she grew to become a topic of heavy doubt and fascination, with some theorizing that she was “a right-wing agitator or a foreign actor” or that she was “designed to collect as much data about Democratic voters as possible for God knows what.”
Amateur on-line sleuths famous that her identify matched a personality on the TV present “One Tree Hill” and mentioned they’d discovered considered one of her profile photographs on a German advertising and marketing web site. (That final half couldn’t be confirmed.)
The assertion she was phony, nonetheless, grew to become simply one other solution to construct an viewers. “A MAGA just told me that my PROUD DEMOCRAT followers are bots,” she tweeted final 12 months. “Let’s prove him wrong — where are my allies at?”
Her most excessive and mean-spirited tweets, together with her glee over the demise of a Jan. 6 rioter, had been typically utilized by conservatives to criticize the Biden administration primarily based on her assertion she’d been concerned along with his marketing campaign.
Her tweet in regards to the affirmative motion resolution, through which she mentioned Black folks wouldn’t achieve a merit-based system, sparked a viral outcry of its personal: One tweet, through which a correspondent for a information outlet masking U.S. Africa coverage tweeted {that a} former Biden organizer had provided “the craziest and most disrespectful argument” he had ever learn, has been considered almost 4 million occasions.
Marsh later defended her tweet, saying it “had been manipulated for propaganda and misinformation by ULTRA MAGA.” The Today News Africa correspondent, Simon Ateba, defended his tweet in an e mail to The Post. “There was no reason to doubt the authenticity of her Twitter account until it was suspended on Sunday,” he wrote. “It is natural for us to assume that the information people provide on their profiles is true.”
A former Twitter belief and security worker who investigated accounts for impersonation and authentication, who left the corporate earlier this 12 months after Musk’s takeover and spoke on the situation of anonymity attributable to worry of harassment, mentioned the corporate had seen a rush of accounts out of North Macedonia round October 2022 posing as pro-Trump influencers and providing up the identical model of “over-the-top, clickbait tweets.”
Troll farms from the republic in Eastern Europe have lately run sensationalist web sites and taken over Facebook pages in hopes of pulling in advert cash from indignant readers within the U.S., no matter their political leanings.
It’s unclear whether or not Marsh’s account was a part of that type of marketing campaign, the previous Twitter worker mentioned, however it shares lots of the traits of the networks of pretend political accounts created through the run-up to the 2022 midterms.
The accounts had been typically run from overseas international locations and opined on divisive present occasions whereas posing as politically lively Americans. They tended to make use of profile photos taken from across the web to create a persona that appeared relatable or partaking: younger ladies, lecturers and veterans. And they used exaggerated political stances to fire up controversy, draw readers’ ire and construct an viewers — both to attain political factors or monetize the account, possibly by altering its identify and content material within the months to return.
For some months, the Erica Marsh account profile included a hyperlink to a Venmo account, which might’ve allowed readers to ship her cash. Venmo didn’t reply instantly to a request for remark.
“You can go a long way with a reasonably consistent, one-dimensional identity online if it has certain features: smart strategies for posting content, an attractive profile picture, a degree of spice and sassiness,” Scott-Railton mentioned. “Our online discourse is deeply vulnerable to this kind of character.”
Alice Crites and Jeremy B. Merrill contributed to this report.