The Nerdrotic Channel on YouTube is one of the larger pop culture pontificators on the web. The commentary is enjoyed by a wide variety of viewers… but not everyone is happy about that. A post from a mostly obscure ๐ went viral recently, and it was none to happy with Gary, the man whose voice you hear when you watch a Nerdrotic video.
Nerdrotic is a piece of shit that weโve allowed to operate amongst us for far too long.
A thread ๐งต pic.twitter.com/Ym62XL7UjR
โ Grayson (MinuteNerdNews) (@MinuteNerdNews) August 3, 2024
So how did an ๐ account with only a couple thousand followers post a thread of hateful statements and suddenly blow up into a five-million view trending topic across the internet? Well, it turns out that a social media analyst and investigator has discovered this might not have been by chance. Instead, it appears this visibility could have been the result of a coordinated effort to manipulate the way ๐ functions. And it could be just the beginning of a campaign intended to possibly create news stories out of falsely trending posts. After all, posts with no appearance of trending status don’t make for great news articles.
Copycat or continued campaign on X? A mirrored thread attempt with 11,00 views tries to malign another popular YouTuber, Critical Drinker
So how exactly does the social media analyst and investigator think this post was made to artificially trend?
One of the more surprising aspects of the internet for those who are unaware is that not every social media post that goes viral does so based on merit. It’s not always the number of eyeballs looking at a Facebook comment or a Tik Tok video that causes it to skyrocket. Though social media companies work hard to prevent this from happening, on occasion we find that some trending social media posts and videos are driven by a more “synthetic” effort. Though complicated and difficult to understand, bots can be deployed by shady efforts to mimic the accounts of humans and thus artificially prop up visibility of things you would otherwise never find because they would have almost no attention.
A deep dive into the accounts supporting the original poster at a time when the account was largely unknown gives us a major revelation. Master of the TDS who runs Gothic Therapy on YouTube managed to discover that the various users following “Minute Nerd News” shared a very peculiar similarity. But in order to know what was going on, they first needed to develop what is called a “node map”.
Node Map of all accounts responding to the thread about Gary of Nerdrotic
At first, TDS and his partners thought the node map looked normal and there were no shenanigans at play. That is until they ran another calculation. This time they created a node map of all the accounts following Minute Nerd News, but they limited the accounts to only those which are publicly available. In other words, they removed private accounts. Normally, this wouldn’t change the result much because private accounts are quite rare on the site formerly known as Twitter — at least if they’re actively participating in online discourse. What they found was startling.
Node Map of public accounts responding to a post about Gary of Nerdrotic
It turns out that the vast majority of the accounts driving this thread to great public visibility were private accounts. That was incredibly unusual. But then they also found that there were twoย very public accounts with vast social media followings that also were in the second node map you see in this article. It appeared without any doubt to our social media investigators that accounts with tremendous influence were connected to a conspiracy to make this thread as visible as possible. At this time, the investigators are not yet disclosing what large-following accounts seem to have been connected with this behind the scenes. Although the original poster, @MinuteNerdNews , may not have been aware, it seems to Master of the TDS that the visibility of this post was dramatically increased in a way that was never intended to be possible on Elon Musk’s platform. It could even represent a first step in a new way of damaging online personalities by artificially sparking topics online from smaller accounts willing to make bombastic statements.
UPDATE 3: Grayson has removed his Protected Tweets status and has just reposted a tweet that seemingly encourages the “whacking” of Nerdrotic. I can only hope Grayson and his friends are joking because that’s probably not a term that I would use. pic.twitter.com/IFZEBSfuoD
โ Price of Reason (@priceoreason) August 5, 2024
Although the goal does not seem to have been achieved this time, this is something we’ll definitely have to keep an eye on in the future.
This article was updated at 5:21 PM EST, 8/7/24 to correctly identify the node maps as representative of accounts following Minute Nerd News.
