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20th January 2022
04:00pm GMT
Bot Sentinel is an independent and crowdfunded organisation that has also investigated issues like the spread of Covid-19 disinformation and the attempts to discredit Joe Biden's American presidential win in 2020.
The new report shows that the Twitter accounts that target Meghan Markle are highly advanced and know how to trick algorithms to ensure they can continue to spread hate.
“This campaign comes from people who know how to manipulate the algorithms, manipulate Twitter, stay under the wire to avoid detection and suspension. This level of complexity comes from people who know how to do this stuff, who are paid to do this stuff,” Bouzy said.
According to the report, the users of these accounts often put "parody" in their bio to avoid being taken down, and also tweet positive things about other royal family members in between their hatred to filter out detection from Twitter.
Roughly 114,000 hate tweets were analysed by Bot Sentinel which included racism, death threats to Markle, and claims that she was faking her pregnancy. Bouzy noted that the content of these tweets was notably more "personal" than that of hate accounts they'd encountered before.
It is estimated that the tweets had a reach of up to 17 million, despite originating from 55 primary accounts and an additional 28 secondary accounts.
A secondary report from Bot Sentinel found that these accounts interacted massively with the media, and this had an impact on news coverage around the Duke and Duchess of Sussex leaving their royal duties.
Tabloids also had a big role to play in fuelling the hate that was spread about Meghan and she has since called this out.
The Mail on Sunday was forced to pay Meghan £1 million in damages after publishing a private letter she wrote to her father.
What's more is that at the start of their relationship, Harry called the press out for the racial overtones that were used in reporting around his relationship and said that even then he feared for Meghan's safety.
Bot Sentinel has called for Twitter to ban single-use hate accounts that are used to direct hate at one person. According to the report these types of accounts can span much deeper into other issues in society.
"Additionally, without new policies to address single-purpose hate accounts and problematic YouTube channels, we could very well see an escalation in incendiary rhetoric that will lead to violence, as we have seen with QAnon, White Supremacists, and other similar hate groups," they said.
A Twitter spokesperson told Buzzfeed News that they are “actively investigating the information and accounts referenced in this report — we will take action on accounts that violate the Twitter Rules."Explore more on these topics:
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