Daniel Easterman, in response to the incident, created a free script that automatically reports and blocks bots.
“When you see such a dramatic increase in followers, it’s usually somebody manipulating the system for commercial gain,” Easterman said. “So that could trigger Twitter to automatically flag that as suspicious activity and suspend the activist’s account.”
This would not be the first time something like this happens: In 2017, Iona Craig, who was reporting on the war on Yemen, was spammed with thousands of fake followers - the fake followers came mainly from Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Jones says this is a form of suppression of free speech on social media; he wrote on Twitter:
"Some suggest it’s a means to degrade the algorithmic quality of a Twitter account so that it possibly gets suspended; some suggest it’s others trying to boost popularity of an account. When it’s unsolicited, as in this case, I tend to think it’s more of a targeting operation. I am naturally cynical, but most people who get a sudden influx of fake followers feel unnerved and uncomfortable. If that fact is widely known, it functions as a tool of surveillance and potentially intimidation (e.g., you are being watched). It also makes many people mute their accounts for a bit which has a censorship effect.”
The murder of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, furthermore, was not safe from the swarms of Israeli bots. In the last week, Jones detected 2,800 fake accounts on the prowl for pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist Twitter accounts. Most of the accounts' bios are written in English with a location: "Israel."
The reason for the influx of followers remains unclear. “Those who get followed understandably find it intimidating, as if a form of surveillance or a technique to try and degrade [the] quality of an account with low-quality follows,” Jones wrote on Twitter. “The fact remains, these are clearly fake accounts and ruin the experience of Twitter.”
Palestinian digital-rights experts have for a long time condemned the increasing censorship of Palestinian content on the internet.
During the May 2021 war on Gaza and the storming of the Al-Aqsa mosque, Palestinian activists also reported that social media platforms were removing their content on Israeli violence and ethnic cleansing in the name of violation of community guidelines. Last month, activists in Jordan reported that posts on Israeli violence in Al-Aqsa were taken down and the respective accounts were blocked. According to 7amleh, The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, the Israeli cyber unit in the government sends content-removal requests to Facebook, Google and Youtube, particularly against Palestinian content.
Cyber censorship and intimidation are just one of the many tacts used by the Israeli establishment to silence their critics, cyber cracking down on netizens exposing Israeli violence and colonial aggression.
End of part 2