https://english.almayadeen.net/news/technology/silencing-dissidence:-israeli-bots-spam-report-pro-palestine
Silencing dissidence: Israeli bots spam, report pro-Palestine accounts
An article by MintPress News exposes how "Israel" uses intimidating tactics on the internet to silence its critics. Just how? Israeli bots.
By the end of April, Ines Abdel Razek woke up to find 80 new followers on Twitter.
“These accounts were following the exact same people that were tweeting about Palestine, but from France or Francophone accounts that work on Palestine,” Abdel Razek said, speaking about the demography of the new followers.
Abier Khateb, a grants manager at Open Society Foundations, also reported mass followings - in response, an advocacy director of Rabet, which is the digital platform for the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, became wary of it.
Speaking to MintPress News, Razek started reporting every account as fake, however keeping her own account open. After a few days, she made her profile private. At the peak of the mass following, Razek saw 400 fake followers.
From the end of April through the first weeks of May, over 40 pro-Palestine accounts on Twitter have claimed mass followings. According to digital experts, when accounts acquire large numbers of fake followers, this triggers Twitter's algorithm and can lead to account suspension, forcing users to make their accounts private to avoid suspension - a censorship tactic.
Some of the human rights and activist organizations that have experienced this are Adalah, Combatants for Peace, Breaking the Silence, and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights. They also included news publications and journalists, like The Palestine Chronicle, The Electronic Intifada director Ali Abunimah, and Hind Al-Eryani; and politicians, such as Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Kingdom.
An assistant professor at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Qatar, Dr. Marc Owen Jones, said that he had conducted an analysis and found that there were more than 1,150 fake accounts in total, of which 1,090 Twitter deleted.
The accounts, according to Jones, were created using an automated process rather than the regular account creation time which takes up to 3 minutes. The profiles, furthermore, were in French, Spanish, German and English - but, very often, they also had Arabic bios with strange names, like Noble Betty Thomas, and zero followers.
“They had clearly made-up names,” said Sarah Lea Whitson, who has also experienced a similar phenomenon. “The vast majority of them had Israeli names and Israeli addresses. Some of them had made-up Arab names, which were mangled. It’s clear that they’re [using] stolen images of people.”
Whitson does not see the bot as censorship, but rather an attack on free speech: “It’s a form of targeted harassment and bullying,” she said. “It’s a targeted attack on people who are speaking freely, including journalists and human rights activists.”