(Note: Ignore the person’s name without context)
Thread on how trip-ups in metadata control and correlation doom an impersonator on Twitter.
It is very hard to run proxy identities over long periods of time. Most of my mistakes are ignored only because I try to be a good person. https://twitter.com/coffeespoonie/status/1206894869031071744

Do not recommend attempting to try to run troll identities, especially if you don’t have a lifetime of experience covering your tracks. Even then it only takes one mistake. It’s just not worth it. It sounds easy but it’s not. Especially once people start poking/baiting you.

One time someone figured out where I lived based on a picture of a trash compactor

Another time an arborist knew the kinds of climate-specific flora outside one of my windows and told me the metro area I live in.
Don’t fuck with arborists.

There are signals in absolutely everything you do, no matter how minute. With enough of these signals they are as unique as a snowflake. Even to people whose entire job is online crime, they are routinely tracked down - based on a few whisps of data - years apart.

And remember, the people who run the platforms you troll have your data and correlations, and they have a say. Or the people that hack them in four years will. See the people getting burned down based on a hacked neo-nazi forum that went offline in 2016.

One time someone took my username, and used a flaw in Minecraft’s legacy account system to find my registered email address, which was under a different identity. They then jumped back further from there.

These metadata cross-pollination events are utterly rife over a lifetime.

Sure, you can be a troll and pull stunts where you never get the real heat on you, or don’t try to cohabitate the platforms you screw around on and keep relatively clean opsec, but all it takes is that little moment in time. Random chance. That tears down your life and reputation

This thread is really targeting any edgelord teens who don’t know how close the precipice is, rather than trying to help neo-Nazis not get fired from Dave’s Scubadiving Emporium, but yeah.

The fact that detailed interior pictures exist for a pretty comprehensive slate of houses owned by young people is a problem.
https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2021/01/02/dream-doxxed/

Another aspect of this:
A lot of high profile trolls end up not actually being anonymous. They just don't care, and everybody in the community knows they don't care, and so it looks like they're anonymous to people looking at a fight from the outside.

Mistaking the extremely callous actions taken by someone with actual impunity, as something you yourself can do without consequence, is going to burn you incredibly hard.
You know nothing about what it has cost them, and how deranged they must be to accept it.

There's plenty of people who know who I am, I just don't give them any reason to discuss it.

This is how actual privacy and discretion works in the real world, outside of incredible cloisterous effort.

The sooner you appreciate this the better.

(Some of my Twitter threads are actually me talking to younger me so just go with it)