by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:
(Mintpress News) MintPress News’ Lowkey, one of the United Kingdom’s most prominent and outspoken opponents of the Israeli onslaught against Gaza, has been under attack. In May, The Daily Telegraph, one of Britain’s largest newspapers, published a report claiming that Russia, China and Iran were boosting the rapper’s messaging on social media “in an effort to stoke division” and manipulate public opinion across the country.
Central to the Telegraph’s claims is a report by tech firm Cyabra, which asserted that 11% of profiles engaging with him on Twitter were fake, implying that an organized bot network was artificially amplifying his messages.
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Yet what the Telegraph failed to inform readers was that Cyabra was not just “a tech firm specializing in countering disinformation online,” as it claimed, but an Israeli company founded by military intelligence officers, half of whose employees have left to rejoin the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to fight in Gaza – and one that continues to openly work with Israeli military intelligence to this day.
Instead, the Telegraph allowed Israeli government officials to assert unchallenged that the United Kingdom was under “threat” from pro-Hamas organisations that are operating all across Britain with a clear purpose to impose Sharia law and to make Britain a Muslim island” and to advise that authorities must be “far more aggressive” against these “enemies” that threaten British values and the British way of life.
Unfortunately, Cyabra’s methodology was as shoddy as the Telegraph’s reporting. First, the study they published does not even mention Lowkey. Second, there is essentially zero evidence supplied in their reporting. Finally, there are no spreadsheets where readers can access the names of the supposedly fake accounts so that researchers can judge for themselves.
The study failed to show whether these bot networks truly amplified messages from Lowkey or other pro-Palestine influencers in any meaningful way. In fact, beyond pointing to some extremely generic profiles with barely any followers and leaving boilerplate replies such as “Amazing! This is fantastic! How cool! Congratulations!” they show little to no evidence of any interference—foreign or otherwise.
The clear implication is that 11% of profiles interacting with Lowkey being fake would be proof that the massive upsurge in pro-Palestine sentiment across the world is artificially manufactured from abroad. Yet what Cyabra leaves out of the report is the crucial context that a considerable proportion of social media accounts are fake and always have been.
Estimates of the true number of fake accounts on Twitter run from anywhere between 5% to more than 80%, and Twitter owner Elon Musk suggested that one in five personas on his platform were false. Cyabra itself claims that 11% are fake and that celebrities and other public figures draw more bot accounts than average.
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