Apologies, my lovelies, if this has been posted already.
We've all noticed the weirdness about the Markle's twitter army. Now read this from 2019:
A European consulting firm has discovered a 'highly-connected' Twitter hive that is attacking journalists who cover the royals
www.macleans.ca
EDIT (in case you need a TLDR) I think this is
very important because it points to the involvement of hostile states:
'In the 89up report, a sample of 3,000 tweets from that Meghan hive of 1,103 accounts revealed that most were from the United States, with Britain and Canada a very distant second and third. But Feldberg points out that anyone can put fake location information on their profile, noting that Curaçao is fourth on the list, followed by Zimbabwe, which are hardly two hot spots of royal Twitter action: “If you’re going to hide, you would put Zimbabwe” on your profile.
Feldberg isn’t discounting the possibility that some super fans might be caught up in the Meghan hive. As he wrote in the report, “It is not impossible that there is just a fanatical community of people online who are tweeting all day content about the duchess, but the scale of the community and the amount of content they are sharing should make us suspicious.”
The big question is why. Feldberg isn’t sure, though the suspicious nature of the linked accounts suggests a more nefarious reason. As he wrote in the report, “The prevalence of strange Twitter user names 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 organization or state.”
EXTRACT FROM ARTICLE:
“The whole thing is a bit insane, really,” Feldberg tells
Maclean’s. Using data tools and software to track keywords such as “Duchess of Sussex” and hashtags including #Markle, he and his colleagues were able to extract relevant tweets, then analyze them for interconnections. With 89up CEO Mike Harris, Feldberg detailed their analysis in a report, “Is there a Duchess of Sussex bot network?”
Source: 89up
89up found “1,103 highly-connected Twitter accounts in a network who share content about the Duchess of Sussex obsessively.” While very few of those accounts appear to be entirely automated—classic bot accounts—Feldberg’s report found that “many have unusual features, suggesting there could be collusion or automation behind some of the accounts.” Many appear to be cyborgs—part-automated, part-human accounts that automatically retweet like-minded messages and also respond to keywords and phrases. One person could run multiple cyborg accounts, making it hard for a casual user to separate real from fake accounts.
Anonymity is a common feature of accounts in the Meghan hive. While royal correspondents and most major royal watchers have verified Twitter accounts, these fake accounts don’t have real profile photos or names. They often don’t have a large number of followers, but they do have lots and lots of interconnections with each other. “They are very heavily connected,” Feldberg explains. “They very much follow each other. It’s a dense network. They retweet each other a lot; the vast majority of tweets are retweets.”
Feldberg usually sees such suspicious networks in political social media. “It’s just the first time I’ve seen it with the royals,” he says. 89up’s analysis appears to confirm what many full-time royal watchers have suspected, and have been quietly talking to each other about, in recent months—that there is co-ordination behind the “pro-Meghan” attacks. Write about fashion—get attacked. Write about the staff turnover among Harry and Meghan’s staff—batten down the hatches. It’s a disturbing trend that has been growing in intensity and vitriol recently.