Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Is A Popular British Twitter Poster With 100,000 Followers A Russian Intelligence Officer?

The person operating the account has denied allegations of links with Russia

The Independent: Pro-Brexit Twitter account account with 100,000 followers could be part of Russian 'disinformation campaign'

Experts warn thousands of fake and automated accounts are currently online.

A “passionate Brexit supporter” with more than 100,000 Twitter followers could be in the pay of the Russian government as part of an international disinformation campaign, analysts have said.

“David Jones” has been tweeting from the handle @DavidJo52951945 for more than four years, amassing an extensive following and interactions high-profile figures including Tommy Robinson and Ukip spokesman John Bickley.

The account has a profile picture of a union flag and the figure 52 per cent, which as was the winning proportion of votes last year’s EU-referendum.

Read more ....

Update #1: Thousands of Twitter users ‘deceived by Russian agent’ (The Times)
Update #2: Twitter account suspected of being part of Russian disinformation campaign (The Australian)
Update #3: Is prolific anti-EU Twitter user really a Russian stooge? Kremlin agent 'may have been behind pro-Brexit account that posted 137,000 tweets' (Daily Mail)

WNU Editor: Apparently the person behind this Twitter account has posted that he is not a Russian agent .... but he has just put a protection wall on his account (his account is here). On a side note, I found this Daily Mail comment interesting ....

.... The account has a following of nearly 100,000 and has posted 137,000 tweets since being set up in 2013.

Keir Giles, a cyber and information security expert at Chatham House, told MailOnline the account was just 'one example' of other similar ones on Twitter.

He said that he had seen the tweets and it was a 'plausible explanation' to suggest that it was a Russian troll account.

Mr Giles added that it would have taken a 'superhuman' effort for just one person to have produced the huge number of daily tweets from the account.


This story is interesting to me because I started this blog 10 years ago, and I have made 85,000 posts during this time (in comparison to 137,000 tweets over 4 years for this British Twitter user who some suspect is a spy). Doing a post is far more time consuming than a tweet which takes a minute or two .... and on top of everything else, I do this blog in my spare time. Super-human .... LOL .... hardly. I estimated that if I was just tweeting instead of blogging I would probably have 200,000+ posts during this 4 year span.

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