We knew what the far right are up to. It was just a case of exposing them.
Over to Marc:
????1 Important news! I've found around 2,800 fake accounts who are bulk following mostly pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist accounts, activists and causes. In addition to other things, they're recently been active on content related to #ShireenAbuAqla
— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) May 15, 2022
Read on>#disinformation pic.twitter.com/aaVIocMX0z
2/ Some of you remember 3 weeks ago the same thing happened. Pro-Palestinian activists and organisations were reporting mass followings. I did a thread on it, you can read it. This led to Twitter suspending around 1090 accounts (see here if you missed it) https://t.co/nPscD21N0y
— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) May 15, 2022
3/ A few activists were reporting that this was still happening so I downloaded the followers of those being targeted, removed duplicates, and arranged them by creation date. As this graph alarmingly shows, 2766 accounts were created in April 2022, while the mean no. of accounts pic.twitter.com/WbZVSy3gBa
— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) May 15, 2022
4/ created per month is 81! In fact, these 2766 accounts were created in just three days! If we examine the creation times we can see that it equates to the creation of around 1 new account per minute (suggesting automation or a lot of personpower). pic.twitter.com/XU1ZjPH1LQ
— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) May 15, 2022
5/ The fake accounts are all quite similar. They have no followers, and follow between 0 and 20 accounts. A lot of follow @TimothyDSnyder , @natpdotcom and @OfficialKat – with a few wildcards. But a lot also follow accounts connecting to @jvplive @BDSmovement – or scholars like
— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) May 15, 2022
6/ @pappe54 and @DrHananAshrawi (I can't list them all here of course. Conversely, some are also following pro-Zionist or official Israeli accounts like @Jerusalem_Post and @Israel. This network is likely the same as the one found at end of April, although now it is active.
— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) May 15, 2022
7/ Around 800 of the bios are in Hebrew, and around 1900 are in English. Most of the English bios are actually just the names of locations, mostly in Israel. Almost none of the accounts have banner profile pictures, but most have stolen photos of real people.
— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) May 15, 2022
8/ The accounts have started retweeting and liking tweets. There isn't partisan consistency. In fact, the network likes both pro and anti-Palestinian content. Below, for example, you can see two examples of tweets about liked by different accounts in the network pic.twitter.com/ifJuy90Nv8
— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) May 15, 2022
9/ Again, the reason for such networks are unclear. If it's just spam, why does it have a political bent? Those who get followed understandably find it intimidating, as if a form of surveillance, or a technique to try and degrade quality of an account with low quality follows.
— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) May 15, 2022
10/ Some think it might be a means of boosting popularity of accounts, although it does seem to be doing this for 'both sides' – although I would say it seems to target more pro-Palestinian accounts. The fact remains, these are clearly fake accounts and ruin the experience of
— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) May 15, 2022
11/ Twitter. If @elonmusk wants to know the extent of the bot problem, this is a good place to start. The place is awash with fake users who clearly can only have nefarious or unhelpful intentions. #disinformation
— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) May 15, 2022
12/ Just a note to say if this is an influence operation, and as if we've seen before, it is also possible someone is trying to antagonise both sides- adversarial influence op
— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) May 15, 2022
Well done Mark for helping us all uncover the way the plutocrats and their minions work.
Remember most sickness can be cured if there is a will.
Douglas James
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