Who is Twitter's Notorious Troll - "K Johnson"?

Many of you who have been following the various discussions and investigations around the Syrian dirty war will likely have at one time come across the Twitter account of “K Johnson”.

If you support the Jihadist chemical staging events, then he will likely be following you. If you oppose these staged events and the mass slaughter of innocents that occurred to make some of them possible then he’ll likely have trolled you at some stage. Maybe he began trolling you years ago and is still at it? He likes to play Clouseau in trying to identify whose behind the various Twitter profiles whom he disagrees with. It doesn’t matter to Ken if you are who you say you are. That’s not relevant. What’s important for him is to prove to himself that you’re someone else.

For years he’s been trying to play Clouseau with yours truly, albeit very badly, and given his irrelevance we simply ignored him. But when dealing with conspiracy cranks everything you say and do is always part of some dark clandestine operation.

There’s an entire trope of these crazies, who coalesce around the NATO troll farm Bellingcat.

That’s just a very small selection of tweets from these crazy people who will consistently ignore the facts in favour of their own conspiracies. That’s how these people roll. Facts and truth don’t matter. What matters is that they believe they are right. It’s a side issue whether they are actually right.

So, recently the Bellingcat troll farm was kicked back into action and Ken and a small team of nutters again thought they would try to convince themselves that Philip Watson isn’t Philip Watson but that he’s “Philip Watson”. However, I’ve been busy with work on Northern Ireland, and genuinely had no interest wasting time on these weirdos. You can’t smarten stupid, as they say. But one of my colleagues suggested we should take a closer look and see who these fruit cakes are given their conspiratorial interests. First up, we decided to show Ken how playing Clouseau is done correctly.

Who is Ken?

We’ve established he’s a weirdo. But what is his identity? And is he who he says he is? He says he has a PhD…

Yet he says he can’t prove it…

If you have a PhD, you can quite easily prove it. But on the other hand if you don’t have one, it would be difficult to prove that you do.

Sometimes he claims to have 2 degrees, one in physics and another in maths.

So it depends on the day of the week you catch Ken on as to what academic credentials he claims he has. In Northern Ireland, where “Philip Watson” is from, we call that, spoofing!

We weren’t buying his self-proclaimed credentials so we decided to profile the “K Johnson” account before going any further. The manner in which we do this is private, however we do, as always, evidence our findings (see below).

As part of our investigation we learned that others had tried to I.D. “K” previously, but we weren’t satisfied they had gotten this right.

It was alleged he worked at John Hopkins university as a ‘Physical Therapist’ but this was at great odds with our own profiling of the Twitter account in question.

We noted that early on in “K’s” Twitter career, 2013/2014, he showed an interest in Indie/Sci-Fi type movies, books, comics and other memorabilia. So upon following that line of enquiry we came across this Twitter exchange.

Note in particular the response of Dennis Cozzalio. He confidently responds to K as “Ken” following the name with a comma. We could now lend a degree of validity to K being called Ken. How? So because one person calls him Ken, he must be Ken? No. But bear with us for a bit…

Dennis Cozzalio

Neither I, “Philip”, or my colleague, had heard of Dennis previously but we soon learned that he runs a blog dedicated to Indie Movie reviews. This fits perfectly with the profiling of the ‘geeky’ type of person ‘interested in space invaders type movies’ that we’d felt we were dealing with in “K”.

Taking a snoop around Facebook we find Dennis’ account. So next we check his friends list for anyone with the surname of “Johnson”. And what do we find?

Low and behold, Dennis happens to be friends with a guy called Ken Johnson! Isn’t that interesting? And although Ken hides his friends list we soon learn he’s friends with Dennis after going through some of his posts and seeing Ken ‘liking’ them. Below is one such example.

Here’s the image before the screenshot of Ken’s “like”…

So whilst to the hobbyist that would certainly be enough to strongly infer K was Ken, we required additional evidence to draw a firm conclusion. So back to work we went. We needed a stronger link to tie the Twitter account and the Facebook account together.

The Link

Sifting through the publicly available pictures on Ken’s Facebook page we came across our first picture that could potentially offer us evidence.

An image with details, such as books, outdoor views or for example papers laying on a table can offer vital clues in an OSINT investigation. So we would make a list of the book titles visible and set it to the side.

Next, going through K’s Twitter profile we came across this interesting tweet that immediately got our attention.

What K is referring to here is the “Wheel of Fortune” symbol he uses as his Twitter avatar…

He says that he first learned of Tarot in a book called “Last Call” by Tim Powers. The name of that book was familiar, I thought. Hadn’t we listed that from Ken’s bookcase? Yes, we had!

In case that image isn’t clear…

Isn’t that the most bizarre thing ever? Too many coincidences going on there, as I’m sure you’d agree, yet now we had enough to satisfy our investigation that both the “K” Twitter account and the “Ken” Facebook accounts were one and the same. We decided to keep looking though.

Both men live in an apartment.

Then there was the small matter of catching both “K” and “Ken” posting to their ‘respective platforms’ at almost exactly the same time. First up is “Ken” posting to Facebook at 5:24 pm on the 28th Jan 2022 (also changing his profile picture at the same time).

Just 4 minutes later “K” posted to Twitter at 5:28 pm.

Seen enough yet? No? OK!

Back to the tweet where Dennis Cozzalio interjected.

Note that Twitter “K” responds to an account by the name of @TrailersFromHel.

We also then learn that K follows this account on Twitter.

But does Facebook Ken follow that account too?

Yup!

In a conversation with Ken tonight on Twitter, 29th January 2022, about movies he suggested that I watch “Resident Alien”.

A series about an Alien that is, well, a resident in a town in America.

Strange recommendation but one that fits perfectly with FaceBook Ken’s profile!

Belittling

101 of OSINT profiling is to look for behavioural patterns. With this in mind we soon noted how Ken sought to belittle those he was going after in terms of their jobs, or lack there-of, or to attack their financial status, if he deemed it to be low.

We felt there was a reasonable possibility that Ken was not financially well off and was thus ‘projecting’. It was a theory that fitted with some of the information we had already obtained. So we decided to approach this from different angles. My colleague would look at him holding a Ph.D in Physics and Math thus at least holding down a job and I would approach this part of the investigation from the standpoint he was skint and struggling.

It was then ironic for us to discover that Facebook Ken was found pleading in March last year (2021) for donations to buy a car after his one was apparently stolen.

Here is the GoFundMe page.

Of course, no right thinking person would wish bad-fortune or harm on anyone else, but there is an element of Karma involved here when Ken begs for money to buy a new car whilst attempting to demean others for, according to him, working in jobs of low profile.

Finances are that bad for Ken that even $5 for a magazine is too expensive.

But What About Ken’s Alleged Physics Ph.D?

Having tied both the Twitter and Facebook accounts together to our satisfaction we then moved on to other searches which took us to a LinkedIn profile for a Ken Johnson. But was it the same person?

Surely it couldn’t be because the Ken on Twitter holds a Ph.D in Physics and Maths, allegedly. This guy here is a “Freelance Proofreader”!

We note that LinkedIn Ken went to “Anderson University”. However, so did Facebook Ken!

But was a there a further link between the LinkedIn account and the Facebook account that we could find for added verification? Well, yes.

Tonya Simpson gave Ken a positive review on LinkedIn and she so happens to be the “Senior Project Editor at Pearson”.

As it turns out, Ken worked for Pearson, according to his LinkedIn profile, from 2001-2012.

So a quick check back at Ken’s Facebook page to see if we can tie Tonya and Ken together in reverse order reveals promising results.

Conclusion

We are confident that “K Johnson” of Twitter is “Ken Johnson” of Facebook. We are also confident in concluding that Ken Johnson does not hold the qualifications he claims that he holds but rather is a fantasist that hangs around on social media with other fantasists aided and abated by the US State Department funded Bellingcat, a renowned troll farm for disseminating junk intelligence and fake emails.

Even a cursory glance over Ken’s Twitter timeline will reveal how he believes himself to be some kind of crack commando investigator when in essence he’s nothing more than a broke, aged fantasist living in some alternative reality that affords him the opportunity to escape his underperforming life.

We were happy to allow Ken to continue with his delusions of grandeur. For us he is a low-level agitator. But he wouldn’t let us forget him.

Even recently, when I (“Philip Watson”) set up my own account away from that of @citizenjournos_ he still continued with his stalking.

His belief (albeit fuelled by the NATO troll farm Bellingcat) is that there is some grand conspiracy in the works because I created my own account. When in essence it’s very easily explained. The @citizenjournos_ account used to be my personal account which was called @philipwatson_ (Twitter wouldn’t allow me to use “”). But after setting up the CitizenJournos website, and as things began to grow, and as other team members would also post tweets using the account I changed its name to @citizenjournos_ to reflect the changes discussed. I felt it better to move to my own account again rather than setup CJs as a new account as it had now been well established. There really was no conspiracy involved. But when dealing with these ‘Truthers’ no matter how much evidence you place in front of the them that proves their theory wrong, the more of a conspiracy they see.

Here’s an example of how the US Department funded Bellingcat fuel the tin-foil conspiracies when their own apprentice OSINT “investigator” Nick “we boots” Waters believes the CJs team are not real people!

It doesn’t matter that these team members have appeared on podcasts or have met swathes of groups in NI. These crazies believe a person called “Philip Watson” (who they don’t believe is called Philip Watson), operates all this on his own. No amount of evidence will ever change the mind of someone who is more invested in thinking they’re right than actually being right.

These people are delusionists – they are fantasists – they are the sort of people who try and apologise for Jihadists who kill women and children in Syria, Jihadists who then stage manage the corpses and claim the Syrian military dropped cylinders from a helicopter and that these cylinders killed these poor people. Make no mistake, these people are deranged!

NATO’s Bellingcat troll-farm has been that fixated on “Philip Watson” for years, and their search for the illusive man had gotten that insane that I decided to email Eliot Higgins of Eliot “suck my balls” fame…

…and his helper, formally unemployed Nick Waters who served with the British military for a spell and who is trying hard to find his way in the OSINT world, bless him. You can read more on Waters’ failed OSINT attempts here.

I suggested it would make more sense if they just asked me whatever it is they wish to know about me rather than wasting all their time and resources trying to I.D. a person whose I.D. is well-known already. All those years and man hours wasted always seemed senseless to me. However, I added a caveat, for every question they ask me I get to ask them one back. That seems fair, right? Apparently not because neither Eliot or Nick ever replied to me but instead continued to play Clouseau on Twitter with their weirdo mates.

In striking up the conversation with Ken regarding movies on Twitter, I asked him to DM me. He declined. My intention was to advise him that we knew who he was, provide him with proof and then assure him this article would never be posted as long as he stopped stalking us and those that work with us. I wanted to give him a chance to adjust his behaviour. He wasn’t interested. That was unfortunate.

Challenging our work is welcome. Venting anger at us is also welcome. Getting annoyed when we expose the latest staged chemical attack in Syria is to be expected. But Ken was stalking. He wasn’t challenging our work. He was also stalking those who followed us or who responded to our tweets. Even when blocked he continued harassing innocent people for the crime of just responding to a tweet we had posted. That is not acceptable behaviour nor is it rational.

Signed off by…

“Philip Watson” aka “Hiltard”, “Hiltardz”, “Phil4truth”, aka “tweet tweet”.