Although much of the reporting in U.S. media on politically motivated social media manipulation has focused on overseas troll farms, this sort of activity is often home-grown and sometimes carried out in plain sight by social media consultants working for major campaigns. One name that turns up repeatedly when digging into various pro-Trump Twitter spam efforts is Jason Sullivan, a self-styled social media expert and “wizard of Twitter”, originally hired by Roger Stone to work on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. He is perhaps best known for the creation of the Power10 retweet automation software, which was used to artificially amplify pro-Trump content, but he has dabbled in other forms of online astroturfing as well (most of which were eventually shut down by Twitter).two accounts are connected in this figure if one retweeted the other via Power10Sullivan’s longest-running known project was the Power10 retweet automation software, which was activated sometime prior to January 19th, 2018 and was eventually shut down on September 19th, 2019, accompanied by suspensions for several dozen users of the software. This software, which was billed as a “secret weapon” despite being publicly accessible to anyone on the Internet, allowed its users to select a list of Twitter accounts that their own Twitter account would then automatically retweet in perpetuity with no further action from the user. The tool was mostly used to amplify the tweets of various pro-Trump Twitter accounts (as well as Donald Trump himself, who probably didn’t need the help). Sullivan’s involvement in the…Astroturfing to the 10th power