Psudo-anonymous social media accounts

General Discussion
1

Hi everyone,

internet, especially social media sites, are increasingly put behind a login/signup wall. I can imagine a journalist having a tough time exploring X (Twitter), Meta, Medium etc. without an account, which potentially leads to them logging into these accounts inside Quebes just to be able to see the content.

No matter how many layers of encryption, Tor, VPN and hypervisor we put in the Quebes OS, that part will become the missing link. I was wondering if it’s possible to have a tool in Quebes OS that creates anonymous an email address or ideally a virtual phone number, and uses that to create random social media accounts for that particular Quebes OS session. technically, the only roadblock to automate most of that is CAPTCHAs which can be presented to the end user as well.

keen to hear your thoughts on this.

2

Hi @n0p, and welcome!

What you wrote is truly impossible, given the resources that the Corporations and the Governments who are behind the current Social Media state of affairs, put into conserving the current Social Media state of affairs.
[ I wrote a looong argumentation but realised it does not make the point clearer ]
You can get some limited anonymity, read-only. But Big Brother wants to control and punish anything you post that may be against his/their interests.

3

in theory assuming you don’t need a phone number you could make a nearly anonymous social media account
you would want to do the following:

Network setup:
BrowserQube → VPN → rotating shared residential proxy → tor bridge → tor entry → tor middle → tor exit → into a another anonymous rotating residential proxy that you never EVER connect to in any way outside of after leaving tor → then from that proxy go to the site

this way the site can’t know who you are as you seem to be either the anonymous proxy hoping form place to place, or the anonymous VPN

or ISP can’t tell apart your normal internet from your anonymous internet activity, seeing as all they would know is that you are connecting to a VPN only

the first VPN would only know you are connecting to a rotating shared proxy service, that service even with logs/timing attacks would only know you are connecting to some random server (the tor bridge servers are specifically not associated with tor)

then the host of the tor bridge would just see you as some random resident somewhere connecting to tor through their bridge

you’d go through tor, connect to the anonymous proxy and then the site

you could then use that qube to access social media accounts, with relative anonymity assuming you have access to an anonymous email

but automating a system for making/deleting accounts would be a useful tool, would me quite a challenge as many sites want your phone number which is not an easy requirement to get around, but if you did you could make it so that it is part of a disposable qube that has different launchers for each service create a new social media account etc each time you launch them. But it def wouldn’t be trivial, just as setting up the needed networking wouldn’t be trivial

but you could still be de-anonymized via advanced timing attacks, as well as speech pattern analysis, and simple social engineering etc, nothing is fully anonymous but I think that is the closest you could get

it would be an interesting project, if one likely bound to fail

1 Like
4

Thanks for the replies. I appreciate that social media companies have a lot of resources and they use rather sophisticated methods to identify the users and link them to certain overall behaviors. But the truth is, without creating a few accounts, people have a hard time navigating the internet. Google account is a good example of that. I’ll do more research around how that automation could actually work and whether that can be used to further anonymize users by linking it to Twitter etc.

5

Any techniques that would allow this are also usable by the spammers/scammers/propaganda sorts, and the social media companies have tried very hard to close those down as hard as they can. Or, at least, to know what they are so they can claim the user #s, but not really promote that stuff.

You pretty much have to generate your own novel method, because as soon as any particular technique scales, it’ll get shut down (or, commonly, “appear to work” for a while, but the accounts are tagged and mass-deleted at some later point).

If social media doesn’t allow public reading, then perhaps it’s not worth bothering with. The internet has gotten… of far lower value in the past few years.

6

This part (VPN before Tor) is totally unnecessary and only adds latency and complications.

7

Not sure I understand, I don’t have a Google account but I don’t feel being limited?

8

Google account is useful for “Sign-in with Google” websites such as Medium. to your point, most Google’s own products for the purposes of journalism do not require a Google account.

1 Like
9

it entirely depends on your goal, if your goal is to make all activity look the same to any wifi/network/ISP you connect to, VPNS are a good first hop.