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The original was posted on /r/aboringdystopia by /u/the_art_of_the_taco on 2024-06-29 18:02:29+00:00.
Original Title: Grifter and entrepreneur Daniel Linden — co-writer of an OnlyFans guidebook — has coordinated a multi-platform network of conspiratorial disinformation, surveillance, anti-Palestinian racism, antisemitism, and offered cash bounties for Pro-Palestinian protesters through ‘Shirion Collective’
i just wanted to add the onlyfans factoid in the title tbh
Shirion has harassed pro-Palestinian activists, including many Jews, offered bounties for the identity of pro-Palestinian protesters, spread conspiracy narratives centered on figures like George Soros, and boasted of an AI-surveillance platform but offered few concrete details of how the technology functions.
Linden set up Shirion’s crowdfunding efforts, appears to play a central role in operating the network’s social media accounts, and coordinates the group’s efforts on a Telegram channel. Public records and online materials indicate he lives in Gainesville, Florida, but he has also had recent stints in Durango, Colorado, and Medellin, Colombia.
The Shirion Collective is an online operation that since late 2023 has appeared on platforms including X, Telegram and GoFundMe to coordinate the spread of pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian propaganda, and the harassment of pro-Palestinian protesters in the west.
Across its two X bios, Shirion describes itself as a “surveillance collective” and a “surveillance network” that searches for “digital fingerprints” to “aggressively track what the MSM [mainstream media] won’t” and “aggressively track and expose antisemitism”.
On Telegram, Shirion hosts a private channel with 885 members at the time of reporting. The channel is further divided into rooms for discussion of events in specific territories (like Canada and Latin America), or for coordination of online activity including mass reporting of X accounts.
Shirion organized two GoFundMe fundraisers in April and May of 2024. The earlier fundraiser brought in more than $57,000, including an anonymous $10,000 donation, for an operation in which trucks with big-screen monitors showed footage of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel near universities in various US cities.
Starting in late 2023 on X, Shirion began offering what it described as “bounties” for the identification of people involved in pro-Palestinian protests whom they characterized as antisemites.
A 29 November post on X advertised an “INSIDERS AGAINST ANTISEMITISM” scheme that promised “CASH for GREAT insider information”.
An accompanying graphic promoted a variety of bounties that increased with occupational status, ranging from $500 for the identification of a student up to $10,000 for a politician. Shirion asked supporters to “BOOKMARK and SHARE to get the word out”.
By 3 December, Shirion was offering a $500 reward, later bumped up to $1,500, for the identity of protesters Shirion claimed were engaged in “genocidal chanting”.
In succeeding months, Shirion has posted dozens of bounty offers and also has claimed to have paid out to people who have allowed them to identify their perceived opponents.
As recently as 19 June, it claimed in a post to have paid out $1,000 for the identity of a protester who was the subject of a bounty on 4 June.
Beyond the bounty program, Shirion voices or boosts Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian hate, while celebrating death and destruction in Gaza, and violence against their supporters in the west.
Shirion has repeatedly celebrated the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza, including Palestinian journalists and children.
On 27 April, Shirion responded to a video that included images of destruction in Gaza, posting “Love that gaza looks like That now”, adding “FAFO”, an acronym for “fuck around and find out”.
Shirion has frequently celebrated police violence directed at pro-Palestinian protesters in the United States. It has also celebrated violence against journalists it characterized as “Marxist”.
On 5 May, in a post depicting a vehicular attack on protesters in Denver, Shirion wrote “LIKE & SHARE to make this more common”.
At various times on X, Shirion has claimed to have contacts in the New York police department and FBI, Israeli intelligence and the London metropolitan police, and to be connected with Republican congressional candidates and pro-Israel academic and commentator Max Abrahms.
And since late last year, it has claimed to have developed an AI technology, Project Maccabee, whose goal it has described as “Hitting and creating AGI for the PROTECTION and survival of our people”, and “EXPOSING these putrid antisemites”.
Shirion has claimed the platform has advanced capabilities. However, Shirion has never made any public demonstration of its operations, nor produced third-party endorsement of its application to surveillance tasks. Nor has it shown that its capabilities for surveillance and identification are vastly superior to amateur open source intelligence investigators.
One thread connecting Linden to Shirion comes from Reddit. The subreddit ShirionCollective is moderated by user “Danimde”, whose screen name is “Dantheprompt”. The subreddit apparently has no other members.
Dantheprompt user profile indicates that the account also moderates 8 other subreddits, and appears to be an enthusiast of generative AI. Most of the subreddits are either have one member or are dominated by posts from “Daninmde”.
Besides the Shirion subreddit, all of the subreddits Dantheprompt moderates are concerned with topics related to the use of generative AI tools including large language models (LLMs) and image-generating tools. The subreddits’ titles include “chiefaiofficer”, “SuperPrompters” and “OnlyFansModelAI”. The last subreddit 3 members which features sporadic posts of AI-generated imagery of scantily clad women, all from from the Daninmde account.
The “dantheprompt” X account is now locked, but it identifies Dan Linden as the account holder, and the biography reads “Co-founder of Chief AI Officer (CAIO) – Building AI Powered (SaaS) – Digital Arts – Mixed Martial Arts”.
In his introductory post on Multiplex, one of Linden’s lines was that he “Built some companies. Wrote some books.”
Public records and open source materials indicate that Linden has certainly started many companies, but it’s far less clear that any of his previous companies survived.
Colorado company records indicate that Linden incorporated two companies in that state: Linden Services in 2006, and Focus Interactions Ltd in 2013. Each apparently lasted less than a year.
In Gainesville, Florida, Linden incorporated a series of companies starting in 2017, including Clickstein LLC, LD Networks LLC and DG Media LLC. Again, all of these companies appear to be defunct.
The companies left few traces on the public record. However, a 2020 English-language media report from Medellin, Colombia, indicates that Clickstein was a digital marketing firm “based on the idea of ‘Einstein-inspired marketing formulas’”, and that Linden lived in the city for a period.
The companies left few traces on the public record. However, a 2020 English-language media report from Medellin, Colombia, indicates that Clickstein was a digital marketing firm “based on the idea of ‘Einstein-inspired marketing formulas’”, and that Linden lived in the city for a period.
A business intelligence site has Linden as “Co-Founder at clickstein.com, bringing experience from previous roles at notyouraverage.marketing, Marketing Bench, Focus Interactions and Cre8tive Ninjas.”**
In recent years, Linden has displayed a preoccupation with OnlyFans, the platform that allows producers of adult content to monetize their content, that goes beyond his sporadic attempts to synthesize AI models.
A 6 December 2022 screenshot of one of his personal Facebook accounts shows an OnlyFans payment notification indicating a net quarterly take of more than $155,000.
On Amazon, Linden is credited as co-author of a Spanish-language ebook whose title translates as Master OnlyFans in just 7 days!, and whose blurb promises to show readers techniques to build “an account that will give you an average of 2,000 dollars a month”.
In 2022, El País reported that Colombia is second only to Romania in the size of its adult webcam industry. In 2019, Colombian news magazine Semana estimated that there may be 40,000 women working as webcam models in the country.
Linden is currently featured on the website chiefaiofficer.com as one of three instructors of a “Chief AI Officer Certification Course” priced at $4,995. He is billed as being in the “top 0.1% Prompt Engineers in the world”.
Beirich, the extremism expert, said that “any time there is a protest movement or a mass mobilization, extremist actors will try to use it to their advantage, whether that’s to hijack the message or to make the situation more volatile”.