A European consulting firm has discovered roving Twitter gangs that are attacking journalists who cover the royals
Josh Feldberg’s dive into the divisive world of royal social media began after he read a story detailing “how royal correspondents were under attack,” he recounts from London. In particular, the journalists who write about the royals for major British outlets such as the Telegraph and the Express were finding themselves under assault on social media for virtually anything they wrote about Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex.
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.
“I have witnessed what amounts to be roving Twitter gangs that find a tweet/blog post about Meghan and kind of rally the troops and stoke up the fires and suddenly you have a hail storm of abuse flowing at you,” explains Jane Barr, who runs the From Berkshire to Buckingham fashion site, which focuses on Kate. “For me, it is very frustrating to write a nuanced analysis and have people just take a black-and-white interpretation and run wild with it.
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.”
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