Researchers have noticed that a portion of the Brexit Party’s Twitter followers aren’t behaving like they’re genuine people.
Nigel Farage’s party, which is predicted to do well in the upcoming European elections, has 136,000 Twitter followers, however two researchers for BuzzFeed News who studied the behaviour of some of those accounts suggest they might not be real.
One account that was set up in March tweeted 23,000 tweets in the first three months, with the vast majority of its tweets about Brexit. That’s approximately 255 tweets a day.
“This isn’t how we’d expect normal people with diverse interests to behave,” Professor Kalina Bontcheva at the University of Sheffield told Buzzfeed.
Andy Patel, researcher at a cybersecurity company called F-Secure added: “This campaign is utilising large numbers of low-quality accounts, including very new accounts and non-UK accounts, to amplify content from a handful of high-profile pro-Leave Twitter personalities.”
BuzzFeed went on to provide the researchers 30 Twitter accounts following the Brexit Party for analysis, and less than 24 hours later, seven of those accounts had been suspended for breach of policy.
www.indy100.com/article/brexit-party-nigel-farage-twitter-following-behaviour-fake-genuine-accounts-8920681
