Who went first

Tim Ballard did. Sixty days before the group posts began, Ballard posted a video and credited Latter Day Chad. This page corrects what we said on October 4 and lays out how the group around them is built.

The post

The header reads “timballard89 and latterdaychad.” The caption is Ballard’s own, and opens: “Brandon, are you saying my doctrine is wrong?” Instagram dates it December 20, 2025. Checked on Instagram

Timeline

Checked seen on Instagram itself, screenshot kept. Our data from our captures of Instagram’s post data, not re-checked by hand.

The group was already there

These are the same 13 accounts as on our card “It started as a group”: Ballard (TB), Chad (LDC), and the 11 accounts that filled the other seats (A–K). Each line is a pair of accounts credited on the same post, counted across everything we have captured for them. The left map is everything before Ballard’s first group post. The right map is from February 18 on.

What the structure shows:

• One host, assigned seats. All seven group posts were uploaded by latterdayavenger, which is not one of the 13. Ballard and Chad hold two fixed seats; the other three rotate.
• The host is a regular. latterdayavenger is also credited on 42 other posts in Chad’s and C’s grids, May 31, 2025 to June 14, 2026, usually as one of three to five credited accounts. Posts with four or more credited accounts are common across this whole crowd: 808 in our captures, 20 to 60 a month since January 2025. Ballard was slotted into a format that was already running. Our data We have not yet captured latterdayavenger’s own grid.
• An old core. Before Ballard arrived there were already 25 links and 634 shared posts. Chad and C alone had 434. Chad–D, C–D and Chad–H were also established.
• Thin new links. From Feb 18 the number of links nearly doubles, but most new ones are a single post (21 of 48). Accounts appear once or twice, then drop out. Part of that is arithmetic: one post with five credited accounts makes ten pairs at once (see the algebra below).
• Ballard hangs on Chad. Ballard has 13 shared posts with Chad and between 1 and 6 with anyone else. Before Feb 18 he had exactly two posts with this group, and he posted both himself.

The data shows who was credited with whom, and when. It does not show who is behind the smaller accounts.

The seven posts as algebra

Treat the accounts as points and the seven group posts as blocks: 13 points, 7 blocks, 5 points in each block. That is an incidence structure, and its algebra says a lot about how the posts were put together.

The incidence matrix N. One row per account, one column per post; a filled cell means the account is credited on that post. Rows are grouped by symmetry (explained below). The right-hand column is r, the number of posts each account is on.

Pairs come in bundles of ten. The pair counts are N·Nᵀ = Σ_B 𝟙_B𝟙_Bᵀ, a sum over the posts. Each post with five credited accounts adds a complete set of ten pairs at once. So the lines in the maps above arrive ten at a time: that is the arithmetic of the format, not ten separate choices.

Deliberately unbalanced. In a balanced design every account would be on the same number of posts and every pair would meet equally often. Here r = 7 for Ballard and Chad and 1 to 4 for everyone else; the pair TB–LDC meets on all 7 posts, and only 40 of the 78 possible pairs ever meet at all.

Take out the fixed pair. Ballard and Chad are in every block, so remove them and look at what is left: seven triples on the other eleven accounts.

The first four triples all sit inside {A, B, C, D, E}, and A is in all four: a core. Then it branches, with B, D and G carrying over as bridges. HIJ stands on its own and shares no account with any other post.

Symmetry. The automorphism group Aut(N) is every way of relabelling the 13 accounts that carries the set of seven posts onto itself. Computed on these posts: |Aut(N)| = 12 ≅ S₂ × S₃, with orbits {TB, LDC} and {H, I, J}, and every other account fixed.

The order of the posts has no symmetry. The seven posts also come in time order, Feb 18 to Apr 18, and the letters A–K follow it. A time order is a chain, and a finite chain has only one order-preserving relabelling: leave everything where it is. Charles Holland studied the group of such relabellings of an ordered set (Michigan Math. J. 10, 1963). Here every one of the 12 symmetries sends each post to itself (TB and LDC are on all seven; H, I and J only on Apr 10), so they all leave the time order alone: the symmetry is in the accounts, not in when they posted.

• {TB, LDC}: from the group posts alone, swapping Ballard and Chad changes nothing. The format treats them as one unit, the two fixed seats. What tells them apart lies outside these posts: Ballard’s own December 20 post, and Chad’s 434 posts with C.
• {H, I, J}: interchangeable. They appear once, together, as a whole block: a batch swapped in as a unit.
• Fixed points: A, B, C, D, E, F, G and K each have a footprint no other account shares.

Large orbits mark interchangeable seat-fillers; fixed points mark accounts the structure depends on. This describes the posting pattern only, not who is behind any account. With latterdayavenger’s own grid captured, every post it hosts becomes another block, and the same calculation can be run on the whole design.

B = [["TB","LDC","A","B","C"], ["TB","LDC","A","C","D"], ["TB","LDC","A","E","D"],
     ["TB","LDC","A","B","D"], ["TB","LDC","F","B","G"], ["TB","LDC","H","I","J"],
     ["TB","LDC","K","G","D"]]
D = IncidenceStructure(B)
G = D.automorphism_group()
G.order(), G.orbits()

What the joint videos say

We transcribed the seven joint posts that have speech (two others are photos, one video is silent). After removing common words, these are the words said most, across all seven together:

Small numbers from short videos: scripture and gathering language (God, Zion, gathered, covenants, scriptures, Joseph Smith, Utah), plus a Korean War segment (Chinese, soldiers, Gapyeong). The names “Ballard,” “Tim” and “Chad” are not said in any of the seven.

How we missed it

Instagram’s collaborator list on a post names the credited accounts but leaves out the account that posted it. On October 4 we counted Chad’s posts whose collaborator list named Ballard. A post Ballard made himself never names him, so the December 20 post didn’t count. It was in our captures of both accounts the whole time.

Limits: Chad’s posts come from two captures merged (October 1 and October 4, 2026), 1,888 posts reaching back to June 20, 2024. Ballard’s capture reaches back to September 11, 2025. The October 1 capture did not show Ballard’s credit even on the February group posts, likely because Ballard blocks the account we viewed it from, so it cannot fully rule out an earlier tie in Chad’s oldest posts (June 2024 to January 2025). Nothing before June 2024 is covered.