An analysis of the hate tweets targeted against Prince Harry and Meghan Markle hints at a possible orchestrated attack against the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
The Twitter analytics service Bot Sentinel recently released results from a review into over 114,000 hate tweets about the royal couple and found 83 Twitter accounts that are exclusively focused on sending out hateful messages about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, specifically the Duchess.
“It took us 150 hours to analyze and review the tweets, retweets, mentions, and friend/follower connections outlined in the report,” CEO Bot Line Chris Bouzy tweeted. “We painstakingly examined everything because we knew other researchers and members of the media would scrutinize our work.”
According to the report, nearly 70 percent of the negative comments come from the same 83 accounts with the sole focus aimed at shaming the Duke and Duchess. Bot Line suggests that the Harry and Megan hate appears to be a deliberate, coordinated, and calculated attack by a cohesive source.
“The woman who operates the duchofnarsussex and OSS_SOE_21 accounts was previously suspended by Twitter,” Bouzy said. “We also suspect she operates a 3rd account (Queen_Leinster) used to attack Meghan and Harry, and amplify the duchofnarsussex account.”
The research team noted their findings of single-purpose accounts that were seemingly created to bring down the couple.
“However, the primary accounts had assistance that allowed their content to be repackaged and shared by accounts with a considerable following,” the researchers said. “We observed the primary accounts coordinating their activities and using various techniques to avoid detection. In short, the majority of the anti-Meghan and Harry activity wasn’t organic.”
Screenshots of some
of the tweets were violent in tone, “one calling for Meghan’s death, as well as posts claiming that she faked her pregnancy and that her children were either born via surrogate or are not real,” Buzzfeed reports.A twitter spokesperson claims “there’s no evidence of widespread coordination, the use of multiple accounts by single people,” but Bouzy is challenging that.