There is so much to do here
After a large storm or tornado the land rather quickly can become nearly feral. Flooding can destroy most of the houses and most people could not move back for even a year. I had a chance to visit the region while someone was building a new home. The coyotes were loud at night, cacophonous and persistent. You could swear it was a dozen or so coyotes, and if you ventured to far off the homestead you’d be a goner. It generated an atmosphere of fear. Once, I stepped outside and shined a spotlight, the kind you use to spot bullfrogs in ditches, I found that for all the rancor, there were only two coyotes.
In social media the problem of multiple aliases and varying personae can create this own atmosphere of fear and acts as a force multiplier for same. The reason why this is, particularly on Twitter, is that you can easily generate many accounts as you want, each supposedly tied to a unique email address (which are also easy to generate). You can in essence produce a pack of coyotes all by yourself in this instance. In one example there is Tim Treadstone who goes by the handle of “Baked Alaska” on twitter and has at least two other persona he uses, one is a bad Jewish comedian and the other is called Microchip and is a kind of an autistic atheist wacky conspiracy generator. These somewhat phony accounts are also called “sock puppet” accounts. Baked Alaska himself has 130k followers on Twitter and his sock puppet accounts often get banned for racist and specifically anti-semitic rants. Until recently these sock puppet accts were not even public. Treadstone was a former employee of Buzzfeed and manager of Milo Yiannopolos, whose well-known twitter trolling just earned him a best-selling book on Amazon. Milo had 300k followers before he was banned for insulting an actress in Ghostbusters. Consider that CNN gets about 500k viewers these days, 300k followers is a considerable number.
But back to Treadstone/Alaska. He often summons his sock puppet golems to attack well known upper echelon tweeters. For example, once Ann Coulter said something racist about blacks, and Treadstone summoned up a bunch of fake black lives matter accounts, complete with stock photos or designed icons of black power to attack Ann with disgusting anti-white racist tweets. Then, he would step up and defend Ann Coulter (known as “white knighting”) and essentially play both sides of the chessboard. You can literally generate your own strawmen enemies and your own army of followers (there are simple macros, or if you are not inclined, you can hire a company to sell you ‘bots’) He likely played these sort of games for Milo and other twitter right wing celebrities, and gets paid to do so, this is a new way of doing PR.
Even higher up the food chain these shenanigans are at work, and it comes down to how seriously you take your persona. Louise Mensch, a former Tory member in the UK and Metallica groupie was given the reigns by Rupert Murdoch to lead Heat Street, a website designed to attract a young hip “conservative” crowd. The point of Heat Street is to poke fun at, yes, the social justice warrior (“SJWs’) crowd. Murdoch spent millions setting up Heat Street, but as Trump started gaining momentum Mensch and colleagues weirdly turned her fire on him, which was odd since his whole ethos is anti-SJW. When Wikileaks released an email from Mensch in which she pitches an ad to the Hillary campaign, basically working on behalf of Hillary behind the scenes while presenting a tough right-wing persona, the entire Heat Street brand was ruined, and Mensch had to step down. Murdoch may have had in mind to have Heat Street, (and Megyn Kelly and Greta Van Susternen) provide some token opposition to a Hillary Presidency, only to later have a change of heart.
So, as I am wont to say, don’t take any wooden nickels. Conspiracy talk about Russian hacks or the KKK, not only are there less coyotes than you think, but there are also often no coyotes at all.