Suspicious ‘bots’ behind flood of Tweets about Meghan
SUSPICIOUS “bot-like” Twitter accounts and handles linked to Russian conspiracy theories have been “obsessively” tweeting about the Duchess of Sussex, an investigation has found.
Analysis of accounts interconnected into a “Meghan Markle” Twitter community found around 1,000 “highly connected” accounts that have tweeted more than two and half million times since September.
An account with the second highest number of pro-meghan followers, which also tweets about US politics from a Democratic perspective, appears to indicate “bot-like activity” while the fourth most shared account frequently tweets from Russia Today and has questioned Sergei Skripal’s near-fatal Novichok poisoning.
The research by 89up, the consultancy firm that carried out an analysis of Facebook data for a DCMS select committee report published last month, found an “unusually high reach” for the narrow interconnected group of Meghan fans.
It comes as the Duchess yesterday joined a panel for International Women’s Day, saying men should embrace the idea they can be both masculine and feminist, declaring that “hashtags are not enough” to bring about real change.
Insisting men must not feel threatened by women as equals, she joked about feeling the “embryonic kicking of feminism” from inside her growing baby bump and said that making men, including her husband Prince Harry, a part of the conversation was the only way to progress.
Having been appointed vice president of the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust, the Duchess spoke at length about the challenges facing women in developing countries and, when asked about extra hurdles faced by women of colour, acknowledged there could be “an added layer of race [or] social demographic” in their treatment.
Last week, Kensington Palace published rules for followers of its social media channels, warning that anyone who posts offensive comments will be blocked or reported to the police in the wake of escalating abuse of both Meghan and the Duchess of Cambridge.
Yesterday, research by the advocacy
group Hope Not Hate and CNN revealed that out of 5,200 abusive tweets directed at the Duchess in January and February, 3,600 came from the same small cohort of trolls.
A report suggests a similar degree of collusion between some of the Duchess’s most “obsessive” champions.
Analysts 89up found a network of 1,103 “highly-connected” Twitter accounts had tweeted 2,555,070 times in six months, with a potential reach of a billion Twitter impressions.
“This is an unusually high reach for a narrow interconnected group,” said the team’s report. While very few of the larger of the Twitter accounts in this community were found to be entirely automated, “many have unusual features,
‘It is not impossible there is a fanatical group tweeting all day about the Duchess, but we should be suspicious’
suggesting there could be collusion or automation behind some of the accounts,” it added.
It also found evidence of “coordinated attacks” on royal correspondents who had written negative stories about Meghan, with one journalist targeted more than 7,000 times.
Josh Feldberg, director of digital at 89up, said: “There is highly suspicious activity on Twitter around search terms linked to the Duchess of Sussex.
“It is unclear the extent to which this content is automated but the prevalence of strange Twitter usernames and the overlap between accounts that tweet primarily about politics but also tweet extensively about the Duchess, could point to an orchestrated campaign to manipulate public opinion by an organisation or state. It is not impossible there is just a fanatical community of people online who are tweeting all day content about the Duchess but the scale and amount of content should make us suspicious.”
Analysts studied accounts connected within the Meghan Markle Twitter community using prominent accounts including “Positivelymegh1”, “Duchessonduty” and “Sussex_archive”.
The Twitter account that tweeted the most about the Duchess was “tvfan00”, which has tweeted 80,000 times in the three years since it started.
The account with the second highest number of followers linked to “Positivelymegh1” is “jaydoll51”, which also tweets about Left-wing US politics and predominantly retweets other accounts (an indicator of bot-like activity, according to the report). This is linked by a follower relationship to other accounts with bot-like characteristics that consistently retweet content about the Duchess.
Another account tweeting positive posts about the Duchess, “Lewisno1fan”, posted 1,596 tweets about her in the past year.
In recent weeks the account downplayed anti-semitism in the Labour party, defended suspended Labour MP Chris Williamson and shared tweets from Russia Today and tweets on Skripal conspiracy theories.