I did the survey in January you cockwomble
An account that posts every few minutes beginning at 0900 UTC +6.5 or UTC +7 and continues posting every few minutes until 1900 UTC +6.5 or +7 is not in Gaza. Like, I'm sorry. You can come up with any amount of plausible-sounding reasons for the timing and it does not change the fact that posting pattern does not match the behavior of actual Gazans but matches the exact playbook reported by every single repatriated survivor of the organized scam industry. The block posting method, where each trafficked person is given a stable of 50-100 accounts they need to make posts to throughout the day, is harder to detect through pure time analysis, but if the account survives detection long enough, you can spot the periodicity. Usually it takes 4-5 days worth of data to conclusively identify block posting by eye; only about 20% of accounts I saw had that much data, and when I suspected block posting but did not have sufficient data, again, I counted it as authentic. Block posting is better identified through means of analysis outside researchers do not have access to, namely login records and behavioral patterns that identify when someone repeatedly immediately logs out of Account A and into Account B. This is complicated by the fact that the cartels provide their trafficking victims with devices running account swap software that attempts to evade this detection through a number of tactics that neither they nor the detection industry discuss in public. (The cartels don't discuss it because they don't want to give sites the clues to detect it more effectively; the industry doesn't discuss it because identifying detection capabilities provides information to the cartels that more effectively allows them to evade detection.) A very few of those detection evasion attempts show fingerprints that can be identified through outside analysis. In the case of suspected block posting where I saw those fingerprints but did not have sufficient time data to conclusively identify block posting, again, I counted it as legitimate. I am aware that Palestinians are humans. I am also aware that the hundreds of thousands of trafficking victims in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar (some of whom are even Palestinians!) are humans. In February, Thailand, China, and Myanmar cooperated to arrange the release of 7000 trafficking victims from Myawaddy. They are still in detention, mostly in Mae Sot, Thailand, because of difficulties in repatriation. apnews.com
apnews.com
That release operation was accomplished by walking into a single one of the compounds in Myawaddy and asking who was being held against their will and wanted to leave. They only had the capacity to rescue a small number of detainees in that single building. The delays in repatriation have meant they have not been able to repeat the operation (and there's a lot of regional politics I'm glossing over here involving which faction of the group that controls that region of Myanmar is in power at which specific time; it sometimes changes daily). This is KK Park. (Image taken from dw.com .) It is one of approximately a dozen towns on the Myanmar-Thailand border that exist solely to house these trafficking operations. It's not even the largest (that's Myawaddy now).
Every building in that photo except for the smaller ones in the back center (which are occupied by the overseers) has bars on the windows because they are full of trafficked people who are being held hostage and forced to engage in internet scams under threat of violence, rape, and organ harvesting. We know what goes on in those compounds because survivors have told us. They are brought across the border, sometimes from very far away indeed, with promises of good paying jobs and the ability to send money home. When they arrive, they are given a "medical exam". The "medical exam" consists of blood and HLA typing. Eyewitness testimony has said that a number of people are removed after the initial "medical exam" and they never saw that person again. This matches multiple past international investigations into organ transplant practices in China operated by these same cartels, where people seeking a transplant can schedule the surgery for a time that is convenient for them because the organs can be provided on demand. The victims whose organs don't match an outstanding order sheet are locked into "dormitories" under armed guard, beaten, tortured, and forced to engage in a number of sophisticated scam operations. Again, the survivors have detailed the exact operations of these scams. Most of them have only a tiny picture of the whole operation, but the people who work with them have taken those tiny pieces and assembled them together to provide a surprisingly detailed picture of how they operate. There are people whose only job it is to make the accounts and make them look real. There are people whose job it is to post, day in and day out. If someone replies to their outreach, they pass them off to the chat team, whose job it is to convince the target to send money. If the target expresses skepticism that they're talking to a real person, there are people whose job it is to make video calls and impersonate whatever story the scam is running on. That role is actually very coveted, because it means those people can't have visible bruises or maiming. The video chatters also have much better living and working conditions and are under video surveillance only a good deal of the time, not direct surveillance, which is a significant improvement over the conditions the posters and text chatters are working in. The UN estimates 300,000 trafficked people are enslaved across Southeast Asia in one of these operations. People who know the industry believe this is a significant undercount. I personally wouldn't be surprised if it were up to a million, across all the countries where this happens. I will refrain from further detailing the conditions these people are enslaved in, because it is deeply fucking distressing. The survivors who have managed to get out or be rescued often also face criminal prosecution for the crimes they were forced to commit. When I say "organized spam cartels", this is what I am talking about. People who don't know the scope of the problem or the egregious human rights abuses it involves always liken this to a person saying "if you give a homeless person $20, they'll only use it to buy drugs" and similar bullshit. It is nothing like that argument. People giving money to one of these operations are directly funding torture, rape, and murder. The people they are torturing, raping, and murdering are very, very motivated to get you to give them money. sigh. Thank you once again, Bluesky, for failing to register the "disable quote post" threadgate and making me have to go back and shut off quote posts one by one after the fact it would be nice if the fucking thread composer reliably recognized that if you disable quote posts on the thread starter you probably want them disabled throughout the thread, wouldn't it